With more than 25% of the local staff either testing positive for COVID-19 or in quarantine awaiting test results, Waste Management is having to juggle staff, equipment and routes to keep the trash collected from area communities and businesses.
In addition to dealing with logistical challenges, the situation is also presenting financial hurdles for the company.
According to Daniel Ray, district operations manager, six of the Kosciusko office 25 staffers were unable to report to work Monday due to the virus.
“It’s a constant struggle right now with short staffing, people in quarantine, extra residential tonnage, falling business and industrial tonnage and multiple routes down,” he said. “People are making sacrifices to be out there.”
The local office handles municipal trash pickup for Kosciusko, Attala County, Carthage, Durant, Goodman, West, Winona and Carrollton, as well as significant business and industrial trash pickup in the region.
The first challenge is ensuring that all the routes get picked up despite lower staffing rates. That sometimes means having commercial/industrial staff redeploy after completing regular routes to take on a portion of a residential route where staff is currently out due to the virus. This means longer hours for employees and added expense for the company.
On Monday, for example, a Kosciusko residential route normally picked up in the morning did not get started until afternoon because Ray had to await the availability of staff after completing their regular responsibilities.
In summer, when children are home, he said the company usually sees an increase in residential volume, but nothing like what they are now seeing while entire families are home, bored, and taking on household projects.
“So many people are cleaning out and doing projects,” he said. “It clogs up the entire waste stream.”
On a route that normally yields 10 tons of residential waste, they are now picking up about 16 tons of trash, and increase of more than 50% according to Ray. And that is just one route.
In total, Ray said the firm is picking up and disposing of between 38 and 40 additional tons of residential waste per week, which also takes more staff time to do.
Available staff is relied upon to do their own normal workload, cover for fellow employees who are out ill, and deal with longer hours resulting from the extra time it takes to pickup and dispose of so much more waste.
The company also has to absorb the related costs since municipal pickup is based on a set annual contract fee.
While they take on those additional costs, Waste Management faces the loss of commercial and industrial revenue since many companies are cutting back or shutting down temporarily. Because commercial and industrial waste is billed based on hauling and weight, that revenue stream is smaller than typical.
Despite the challenges, Ray said the company is doing all it can to complete pickups on regularly-scheduled days and asked that customers be patient while staff does the best it can to serve them under difficult circumstances.
Some customers, he said, are calling in asking about residential pickup less than 30 minutes after they are used to having their trash picked up.
“People are still expecting things to be completely normal,” he said, “but it just can’t be normal.”
