Running a roll-off bin fleet through refurbishment

Waste bins take more abuse than almost anything we work on. Loaded with rubble, dragged on concrete, left outdoors permanently, and repainted only when they look embarrassing.

Why they corrode where they do

• Floor and lower walls, where material sits and holds moisture.
• Rails and rollers, where coating is mechanically scraped off every time it is loaded.
• Weld lines and seams, always the first galvanic weak point.
• Door frames and hinge points.

Cycling rather than shutting down

Nobody can take a fleet off the road. The workable approach is a rolling programme — a set number of bins per month, scheduled around your slowest period, so capacity never drops enough to matter.

It also flattens the cost. A fleet refurbishment as one project is a capital conversation. The same work at three or four units a month is maintenance.

What to expect

Blasting will find holes. On a bin that has been in service a decade, that is not a surprise and it is not a failure of the process — it is the information you need to decide which units are worth coating and which are worth scrapping.

Bin fleets working Medicine Hat, Redcliff and Dunmore cycle hard enough that refurbishing on a rota — a few units at a time — keeps the fleet earning instead of taking the whole lot out of service at once.