Why do most UAE offices still use the wrong size trash cans for their spaces?
Hi everyone, so I want to bring up something that I noticed recently at my workplace and I'm curious whether other people in similar environments have thought about this or whether it's just me being overly observant about things that most people don't pay attention to. I work in a fairly large open plan office in Dubai and we went through a full office renovation about eight months ago where everything got updated including the furniture, lighting, partition walls and general layout, but somehow the waste management setup was completely overlooked and we ended up with the same mismatched collection of https://www.crateco.ae/category-products-list/waste-bins trash cans that we had before, just moved around to fit the new arrangement. The result is that we have small decorative bins next to workstations that fill up within a couple of hours on a busy day, larger bins in the wrong locations where foot traffic is actually minimal, and no logical system connecting any of it to how the cleaning team actually operates their collection rounds throughout the day.
I raised this with our office manager and the initial reaction was basically that bins are bins and it doesn't really matter much, but I genuinely think a poorly planned waste setup affects the cleanliness and atmosphere of a workspace more than people realize. When the bins near desks overflow before the cleaning team does their afternoon round you end up with waste sitting on floors or desks which looks unprofessional and creates odor issues in a climate where things deteriorate quickly if not dealt with promptly. I started looking into this more seriously and found some useful information on crateco that helped me understand how commercial waste management is actually meant to be planned in terms of matching container capacity and placement to usage patterns rather than just filling spaces with whatever is available.
What I'm specifically trying to work out is what the right ratio of bin capacity to workstation count actually looks like in a standard office environment, because everything I find online seems to be based on European or American office norms which might not translate directly to how offices here in the UAE operate in terms of food waste from people eating at their desks, the volume of paper waste from printing, and the general pace of the working day. Has anyone here done a proper waste audit for their office or worked with a supplier to plan a bin setup that actually matched how the space is used, and did you find that getting the sizing and placement right made a noticeable difference to how clean the office felt on a day to day basis without requiring the cleaning team to do more frequent rounds than they were already doing?