How to get government waste and recycling contracts

Residential and commercial collection

Cities buy household collection one of three ways: with their own crews (Phoenix, whose council-set residential rate reaches 42.32 dollars a month in July 2026), by contract after a competitive process (Detroit's 2024 five-year contracts with five renewals, split between two haulers for about 227,000 households at roughly 40,000,000 dollars a year), or by franchise, where the city grants one or several haulers the right to serve the territory and takes a fee. State law decides which. California Public Resources Code 40059 lets a local agency award collection with or without competitive bidding and grant a partially or wholly exclusive franchise. Texas Health and Safety Code 364.034 makes a municipal franchise supersede any other inside city limits. Florida layers on protections for the incumbent that the next section covers.

The term-contract market

Every other public body, and every department of the city that is not the solid waste department, buys container service the way it buys anything else: a term contract, usually one year with renewals, priced per haul, per container per month and per ton. School districts, universities, housing authorities, county facilities, parks departments, transit agencies and hospitals all run these, and they are advertised above the state bid threshold (50,000 dollars for Texas cities under Local Government Code 252.021, for instance). See how to sell to school districts, how to sell to county government, how to sell to universities and colleges and how to win public housing authority contracts.

Liquidated damages are itemized: Storey County's draft charges 300 dollars per unresolved missed-collection complaint, 300 for spillage, 500 for property damage and 250 for a late report; Sonoma's schedule escalates from 300 to 750 dollars per incident over the twenty-year term. See Liquidated damages.

Why the incumbent keeps it

• Statute. Florida section 403.70605 requires a local government that displaces a private hauler to give three years' notice, hold a public hearing, and pay the displaced company eighteen months of gross receipts; section 403.706 requires sixty days of negotiation with an exclusive franchisee before soliciting anyone else for curbside recycling. California allows the exclusive franchise without a bid at all.
• Extensions. Keller extended its incumbent of sixteen years for five more with a five-year option after a two-bidder process. Sonoma's agreement runs twenty years. Round Rock's commercial franchise ordinance gives the city sole option to renew for up to five years at a time.
• Assets. The contractor owns the carts (Storey County), the trucks are routed to the territory, and the transition cost of 100,000 new carts is the city's problem if it changes haulers.

A challenger does win occasionally; Priority Waste took the east and southwest Detroit districts from GFL in 2024, as an established regional hauler with a fleet, not on a first public bid. Treat the collection contract as a five-year objective. See Incumbent.

The as-needed container contract is the entry point. The City of Baytown, Texas bid annual as-needed roll-off container service in April 2023 and drew seven haulers, from a regional roll-off operator to WM and FCC Environmental. Per-haul prices for a 30-yard box ran 325, 395, 473, 480, 530, 540 and 650 dollars; for a 40-yard box 375 to 697. The low bidder was the regional firm. That spread is the market: a lean local operator can undercut the nationals on a per-haul schedule because the nationals price the same truck against a franchise route.

The bid form is a unit-price schedule and it has to foot. Typical lines: delivery and pickup per container size, per-haul price, monthly rental per container, disposal per ton (as a pass-through at the landfill's published rate or bundled into the haul), and sometimes a per-pull price for a compactor. Estimated quantities set the extended total, so the 30-yard haul line usually carries the award. See Unit price contract and IDIQ contract.

Districts and campuses bid the same way for scheduled front-load service, priced per container per pickup per week, with recycling as a separate line and a construction-debris roll-off schedule for summer projects. Housing authorities add bulk pickup by the load. A single district or county facilities contract is commonly in the tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands of dollars a year; check the estimated quantities, because nothing is guaranteed.

Disposal is the largest cost in any hauling contract and the one most likely to be mispriced. The Environmental Research and Education Foundation's 2024 survey put the national average municipal solid waste tipping fee at 62.28 dollars a ton, up 10 percent in a year, with the Northeast at 80.67, the Pacific at 72.88 and the South Central states at 44.87, and private landfills charging about a third more than public ones. A bid that bundles disposal into a fixed haul price is a bet on that number for the whole term.

The clean structure is a haul price plus disposal at actual, with the landfill's rate sheet or the county's published fee as the index and an adjustment clause when it changes. Franchise agreements do this explicitly (Storey County adjusts the disposal component by the actual tipping-fee change), and a term-contract bid should ask for the same in the clarification period if the form is silent. Transfer-station operation and long-haul contracts are a separate, larger procurement priced per ton; they need a permit, a scale and a fleet, and belong to a hauler's second or third public year.

On federal installations, refuse collection is a Service Contract Act occupation and every covered contract over 2,500 dollars carries a wage determination. In California, hauling refuse from a public works site to disposal is itself public work under Labor Code 1720.3 and carries prevailing wage. See Prevailing wage and Davis-Bacon for contractors.

Processing is bought by the ton at a materials recovery facility, and the contract is really a formula: a processing fee, a commodity revenue share, a contamination charge and an audit clause. The figures move with the commodity market. A 2025 National Academies review put Florida processing fees at about 107 dollars a ton (against 50 to 60 historically and 210 at the top), Oregon at 85 under a roughly 97 percent revenue share, and the Northeast at 80 to 150. Los Angeles's 2024 contract with Athens Services prices 450 tons a day at 128.75 a ton with an annual escalator, rebates all commodity revenue when values fall below cost and, when they exceed it, drops the fee and shares 70 percent of the profit; 87,100,000 dollars over five years. Rhode Island's state facility runs a 50-50 profit share that paid municipalities 42,645 dollars in fiscal 2022 and nothing in the three years after.

For a hauler, the point is that the recycling line in a collection or container bid needs a processing agreement behind it with the same formula, or the commodity risk lands on you. The Recycling Partnership's MRF contracts guide covers the eleven clauses a processing agreement should have. See how to sell to special districts: water, fire, transit and parks for the solid waste authorities that own many of these facilities.

Two smaller public markets sit beside hauling and are bought separately, usually by the purchasing or records office rather than facilities.

Shredding. Public bodies destroy records under the FACTA Disposal Rule (16 CFR 682.3: burning, pulverizing or shredding so the information cannot practicably be read or reconstructed, with due diligence on the vendor), HIPAA's media disposal standard at 45 CFR 164.310 for health records, and state records-retention schedules. The gate is NAID AAA Certification from i-SIGMA: scheduled and unannounced audits, background checks, random drug testing of at least half the staff with access, at 1,310 dollars a year per location for a facility or mobile operation and 1,455 for both. Contracts are priced per console or bin per pickup, per box for purges, and per pound for bulk, on annual terms with renewals.

Electronics. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have e-waste laws, and public bodies dispose of computers under data-sanitization and downstream-tracking rules. The certifications buyers ask for are R2v3 (an ANSI standard from SERI) or e-Stewards (which bars export of hazardous e-waste to developing countries and pairs with NAID AAA for data). Contracts are priced per pound, per pallet or per unit, often with a revenue share on resalable equipment and a certificate of data destruction per serial number. California funds collection through a consumer fee on screens, extended to battery-embedded products from January 2026; check the current fee and the state program rules with CalRecycle. See how to get government IT contracts at the state and local level for the asset-disposition side of the same buyer.

The scale of the collection contracts is what keeps them closed. Storey County's draft franchise asks for a 500,000-dollar performance bond, 10,000,000 dollars per occurrence in general and umbrella liability, 5,000,000 in auto and 15,000,000 in pollution and remediation liability. Sonoma's agreement carries 5,000,000 in general and auto. Portland's ordinance sets 2,000,000 general, 2,000,000 auto and a 1,000,000 auto pollution endorsement. Municipal commercial franchises are lighter: Round Rock requires 1,000,000 in general liability, Tampa a 50,000-dollar bond.

Term contracts sit closer to the ordinary public-works floor: general liability of 1,000,000 dollars per occurrence and 2,000,000 aggregate, auto of 1,000,000 (higher for a roll-off fleet), workers' compensation, and pollution liability increasingly requested on anything that touches a landfill. A bid bond of 5 percent and a performance bond of the first year's estimated value are common above the state threshold. Build the surety relationship before the first bid. See bid bonds and performance bonds explained and how to build an RFP compliance matrix.

Also on the checklist: the state hauler registration or solid waste permit, the landfill or transfer station agreement showing where the material goes, the vehicle list, the driver roster and, for franchises, audited financials. A missing landfill agreement is the most common reason a first roll-off bid is set aside.

The sequence that works: as-needed roll-off and front-load term contracts for districts, counties and campuses first, because the field is open (seven bidders at Baytown) and the unit-price schedule rewards a lean operator. Then scheduled facilities refuse and recycling for the county or the city's own buildings, which is the same service at route density. Then transfer, long-haul or a municipal commercial franchise, where the city takes its fee and does not restrict entry. The residential franchise is the five-year objective, pursued by knowing the term, the renewal options and the notice period in every city in your territory, and being the hauler the public works director already uses for something.

Container and hauling bids are posted on district and county procurement pages and the hosted bid systems they use (BidNet Direct, DemandStar, Bonfire, PlanetBids), on state portals for state agencies and universities, and, for the franchise market, in the legal notices the statute requires. Cooperative contracts exist for equipment (Sourcewell holds refuse-truck, cart and compactor awards) but rarely for collection service itself. See cooperative purchasing for vendors: what a co-op contract actually costs you and Free ways to find government bids. What is open today is on the opportunity hub.

A hauler with a roll-off fleet and a front-load route is inside the territory of a county, a dozen districts, two or three campuses, a housing authority and every city department that is not solid waste, each buying container service on its own form. Knowing which is open this quarter, which one's landfill clause will hurt you, and when the city's franchise comes up is the work that does not get done from the cab.

That is the work we do. We find the bids you can actually win, we read every page of every one, we tell you why it fits or why it does not, and we write the response: the unit-price schedule in the buyer's format, the landfill agreement, the fleet list, the certificates, the bond forms. You set the prices and you sign it. Every response is built for one company and never reused.

If you want to see what is open in your territory, book a call. Twenty minutes is enough to see what is open for you.