Waste & Recycling Services Auditing
Stop Overpaying on Waste & Recycling — Cut Costs 30–40% or More
Incorrect or Outdated Tariffs
Duplicate or Hidden Fees
Charges for Inactive Services
Estimated or Faulty Meter Readings
What Is a Waste & Recycling Audit?
A waste & recycling audit is a deep, line-by-line review of your invoices, contracts, rate changes, and waste programs to uncover overcharges, hidden fees, and inefficiencies. At P3 Cost Analysts, our team — whom have direct waste industry experience — uses our proprietary benchmarking database and decades of hauler insight to compare your charges against fair market standards, detect where your service is mispriced, and recapture credits where your vendor failed to comply.
This isn’t a high-level estimate; it’s forensic-level auditing of your waste accounts — trash, recycling, medical waste, compactor, roll offs, and containers — to protect your bottom line.
What We Audit
We examine every dimension of your waste and recycling program, including:
Invoice line items
Every fee, surcharge, maintenance, “other” category
Contract terms
Escalation clauses, renewal language, notice periods
Service levels & routing
Frequency, container sizes, compactor usage
Equipment & container usage
Right-sizing, ownership, maintenance responsibilities
Pickup & exchange charges
Verifying when and how charges were applied
Waste classification
Ensuring you’re not over billed for misclassified waste
Benchmark comparisons
Matching your rates against our P3 database of 30,000+ client locations and hauler pricing norms
Historical recovery
Detecting credits or refunds you’re owed for past overcharges
Why Waste & Recycling Costs Creep Up
The waste industry is purposely opaque. Contracts and invoices are filled with “extras” that vendors count on your teams not catching.
Common overcharge drivers include:
New and vague “surcharge” fees
Fuel, recycling offsets, 'open lids', and contamination fees among others
Container and equipment “maintenance” fees
Unnecessary charges on equipment units vendors still own
Extra pickup charges
Erroneous extra pick up charges and exchange fees stacked with removal/re-delivery charges
Misclassification of waste types
e.g. charging “hazardous” or “liquid” when criteria
Compaction inefficiency
Trucks run half-empty or bins aren’t used fully but billed as if they were
Contract escalation or auto-renewals
Large price increases get locked in without oversight
Franchise market overcharges
Where municipal hauler agreements allow inflated pass-throughs
Our Proven 4-Step Process
We gather invoices, contracts, and a signed LOA.
We cross-check every line item against contract
terms, tariffs, and competitive benchmarks.
We present identified overcharges, contractual
risks, and savings opportunities.
We implement the savings with utilities, and each month, we audit new bills to catch vendor violations and overcharges
Benefits You Can Expect
Recovered refunds from overbilling
Lower base rates and more advantagous contracts
Transparent and defensible fee structure
Ongoing protection against hidden vendor “creep”
Benchmark-backed confidence via P3’s database
Zero-risk, shared-savings engagement
Who We Help
We work with organizations across sectors with significant waste & recycling spend:
- Hospitality & hotel groups
- Multi-location retail & QSR chains
- Healthcare
- Industrial & manufacturing
- Commercial property portfolios
- Schools and Universities
- Anyone spending more than our category minimums
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a waste audit cost?
There are no upfront fees or charges. We only bill based on implemented savings, that are easily quantifiable. These are easily seen comparing the charges we achieve for you on the new invoices, vs the old invoices.
Then we simply share in the savings each month for a finite period of time (12-60 months depending on the level of service our clients want).
What data do you need from us to get started?
We need 3 months of the most recent invoices, a signed LOA, and a list of locations. We can often get these invoices via online login portals our clients already have set up. We need the signed LOA to communicate with vendors on your behalf to perform our audit. No changes are made without client approval.
What types of savings and errors do you find most often?
Waste haulers are notorious for overbilling their customers. What this means is they charge the highest price they can for the service. Like airline seating pricing you may have one person paying double what the next is. Without our nationwide database of vendor benchmarks it is impossible to know if you are getting the best deal possible.
Furthermore, we find billing errors against the contract frequently. The onus of identifying and fixing the billing error is on the client. The vendors are not going to proactively refund those.
Lastly, it’s incredibly important to monitor these costs each month. Without ongoing monitoring these costs will creep back up. This is a big part of the value P3 provides our clients.
I’m under contract with my vendors, how can you help?
This is a common misconception. We typically stay with the incumbent provider where possible. Provided they are providing good service for our clients at rates we know to be fair.
This means we can often implement our findings inside of any existing agreements. Long story short, every one of our clients had existing hauler agreements in place at 95% of their locations. This is not a concern for us.
Will you negotiate with providers?
Yes. After our initial findings are approved by you, we handle everything from there. We negotiate refunds/credits, and implement those savings moving forward. These are often lengthy negotiations, with lots of back and forth, to both get costs down and make sure any new agreements have the protections in place to keep them down.
What does “risk-free” mean here?
Our service is contingency-based—there’s no upfront cost, and fees are tied to verified savings. If we don’t find you savings, that don’t hit your bottom line, there is no fee. It’s that simple.
How long does a typical audit take?
We aim to deliver our initial findings within 30 days and deliver savings within 90 days to your bottom line.
I have people on my team that handle this/I handle this myself, why would we need you?
If you work for a business or own one, you’ve been managing these expenses since the beginning. We find savings 90% of the time for businesses and organizations we look at.
However, if the answer to all of the following is true, you may not need our help.
- Is the person who is managing this expense category, only managing that expense, and has no other duties?
- Are they incentivized to save every dollar on a performance basis in that particular expense category?
- Do they have over 10 years (minimum) of sole focus on this particular expense category, doing nothing else each day?
- Do they have access to thousands of other comparable data points across industries, organizations, and peers outlining comparable costs (at a line-item level) of this particular expense category?
- Have they worked for the waste and recycling haulers before and understand all the tactics and nuances of the industry?
If the answer to all of those is ‘yes’ then we would concede a cost reduction audit by category experts may not yield results. However, given we only charge if we find savings, it’s certainly worth a shot and we are happy to invest our time and resources on our client’s behalf.
Related Services
Utility Auditing (Electric, Water & Gas)
Telecom Auditing(Phones & Internet)
Ready to reclaim overcharges and right-size your waste spend?
Schedule your free Waste & Recycling Audit today.
No upfront cost. No risk. Just verified savings — powered by P3’s benchmarking and hauler expertise.