Learning About Basic Manufacturing

Posted on: 12 June 2017

Any property with dumpsters has had to deal with scavengers coming in and digging through trash and recyclables. If you have dumpsters for these purposes or have dumpsters for collecting construction materials that could command a price at a scrap recycling center, you need to take steps to reduce the scavenging that could go on. While a lot of scavenging is fairly harmless, it does invite strangers onto your property and increase the amount of trash that can end up outside the dumpster. And if you're trying to collect scrap metal to fill your own coffers, you need to protect that metal from what is essentially theft.

Locking Lids/Bear Bins

The most direct type of protection is a locking lid. There are gravity-triggered locks that unlock when the bin is turned upside down; you'll find a lot of these on so-called bear bins, residential-curbside-type bins that are meant to withstand wildlife in rural areas. But dumpsters also have locking lid options. If the lid has a slot through which you throw garbage or recycling, you might not be able to stop all scavenging—as long as someone has one of those plastic trash pickers (those long-handled sticks that have a grip at the end, activated by a button on the handle), they'll be able to sort through the bins. But the locks do make scavenging much more difficult, noisy, and time-consuming. Many scavengers would just move on to another property.

Frequent Recycling Pickups

Because much of the targets of scavengers are recyclable items, ensuring you don't have that many recyclables on your property is another way to stop scavenging. Arranging for more frequent pickups is one strategy, though scavengers can quickly learn the schedule and just come back on those days, or the nights before. Another thing you can do, if you have the time, is have one regular pickup but then call and arrange for separate, random pickups each week. If you're having a real problem with scavengers, you may also want to consider having an employee drive the recyclables to a center instead.

Guards for Valuable Waste

If one of those dumpsters is for scrap metal collection, or for collecting any material that is very valuable and that you were planning to sell yourself for scrap, then you need to lock the dumpster up and treat it like other valuable equipment. You also need to take the scrap metal in more often so that there is less sitting around to tempt scavengers.

Talk to your dumpster rental company, one like Parks & Sons of Sun City, Inc., to see what solutions they offer. They have dealt with scavenging problems before and should be able to install locking lids or other security measures.