Waste is part of your event plan, not an afterthought
For any event on council land or requiring a licence, waste management forms part of the event plan you submit. Glasgow, like other Scottish authorities, expects to see how you intend to provide for waste, how it will be collected, and who is taking it away — with a licensed carrier named.
That means the contractor needs booking before the plan is signed off, not the week before the gates open. It also means the waste plan and the site plan have to agree with each other: bin positions need to be on the site map, and the clear-down needs to fit inside whatever window the venue or the licence allows.
The practical version: whoever writes the event plan should be able to answer three questions — how many bins, where, and who empties them.
Working out how much provision you need
There is no single formula, because a food-led street event generates several times the waste per head of a sports fixture. As a starting point, plan a waste point per 250 attendees, put them in pairs so recycling is never more than a step further than general waste, and concentrate them where food and drink are served rather than spreading them evenly.
The commonest failure is not too few bins overall but bins in the wrong place. People do not walk to a bin. If the nearest one is more than a few paces from where they finish their food, the ground becomes the bin, and your clear-down doubles.
For anything running more than about six hours, plan a mid-event swap or empty. A full bin stops being a bin and starts being a pile.
- Bins in pairs: general plus recycling
- Position at exits and food areas
- One point per 250 attendees as a start
- Double provision at bar and food court
- Plan a mid-event swap for long days
- Back-of-house needs its own bins
Got a clear-down deadline?
Tell us the site, the dates and the hour it has to be clear by. We work back from the licence, not from office hours.
Segregation, and why it saves money
Scotland requires businesses to present key materials for separate collection rather than mixing everything into one bin, and events are no exception. In practice that means cardboard, glass, cans and plastics kept out of general waste where you reasonably can.
The financial argument is simpler than the regulatory one. Clean, separated cardboard and glass have recovery value; the same materials mixed into a general load and rained on have none, and you pay to dispose of the lot. Back-of-house is where most of the easy wins are — traders generate large volumes of clean cardboard and shrink wrap that never needs to touch the public bins at all.
Give traders their own back-of-house waste point and tell them the rules in the trader pack. It costs nothing and it is the single biggest lever on the final bill.
The clear-down window is the whole job
Most event waste work is not the event, it is the four hours after it. Parks want the ground back by morning, venues have another booking, and street closures reopen to a schedule that does not care whether the marquee is down.
That window is what a contractor is really pricing. A clear-down that has to finish by 6am is a different job from one that can run through the next day, and telling us which it is at the quoting stage is more useful than telling us the attendee number.
We work to the deadline on the licence rather than to office hours — overnight clear-downs are normal for us, and for a multi-day event we can run a standing round through the event rather than only at the end. That is events waste management.
What to tell your waste contractor
Six things, and they are all things you already know: the site and its access, the dates including build and break, expected attendance, whether food and drink are being served, the clear-down deadline, and whether there is anywhere on site a lorry can actually get to.
Vehicle access is the one most often left out and most likely to cause a problem on the night. A park pitch that is fine in June is a different proposition after three days of rain, and a city-centre square may only be reachable outside pedestrianised hours.
With those six answers we can price it properly rather than hedging. Prices run from £290 + VAT for a small function clear-up to £550 for a full-site clear-down, with multi-load events priced on the plan.
