Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trash bin cleaning
Germs and bacteria can live in and on dirty cans
You may not want to do it, but these companies will.
You don’t need to be told that your trash contains bacteria and germs:
Salmonella. E .coli. Yeast. Mold. Staphylococcus aureus.
And you likely don’t want to think about what’s left in your bins after they’re emptied and left in the sun all day.
Neither your city nor your waste pickup service is coming back to clean them for you.
But a growing number of small businesses in South Florida will, and they’re betting that once you’ve had your waste bins cleaned and sterilized, you’ll sign up for life.
Cleaning your trash bins wasn’t so difficult back in the days they were small and round, and you could leave much of your garbage on the curb in tied-up plastic bags.
Today, most waste haulers require residential customers to use two wheeled 64-gallon containers, a green one for garbage and a blue one for recyclables. The trash trucks pick them up with mechanical arms, and whatever doesn’t fit in those two bins isn’t taken.
Coral Springs resident Celeste Munshi got tired of getting her garden hose out and trying to clean those king-sized bins herself.
“I really don’t enjoy doing it on my own,” Munshi said in an interview. “I clean them but they don’t get as clean as they could be. They’re big cans. Most of my body fits inside of one, but I don’t want to go inside and get my hair all wet. You’ve got to get a brush to scrub it out. It’s a stinky mess.”
Munshi recently discovered a post on Nextdoor.com, a neighborhood-level social networking site, for a service called Bin Doctor that offered to clean peoples’ trash bins for roughly $10 a bin [less for clients who subscribe long term]. She decided to give it a try.
Spiro Edgos, the company’s owner, drove his colorful truck to Munshi’s home and went to work. He pulled out a power sprayer and cleaned the outside of the bins, then sprayed down the caked-on grunge inside.
A mechanical arm wrapped itself around the two bins and flipped them over a pair of spinning nozzles that sanitized the inside of the cans with 190-degree blasts of water, which is then collected into a holding tank that Edgos empties at the North Springs Improvement District water treatment center in Coral Springs.
That’s better for the environment than the do-it-yourself method of using a bleach solution that runs down the driveway and into the storm drain, Edgos said.
Finally, Edgos sprayed a odor neutralizer inside the bins and wipes them dry.
“I usually ask the homeowner to be there the first time I clean their bins,” he said.
Munshi was dazzled. “I took pictures and posted them on Nextdoor,” she said. “It smelled a lot better. It looked a lot better. I felt good about having that done.”
Sunday marked a full month that Edgos has been offering the service in neighborhoods of Coral Springs and Parkland. After he was laid off from a three-year job selling software for IBM last November, he decided to go into business for himself. One day he smelled opportunity. “I have two little ones in diapers, and I couldn’t walk through the garage without holding my nose because those diapers were in the garbage,” he said.
When the idea to start a business cleaning trash bins first entered his head, Edgos thought he was the first one to think of it. But after some Google searches, he discovered others had gotten there first.
Then he found the mothership of the fledg-
“I had the idea and my father funded it. I’m motivated and I love doing it. It’s something everybody needs.” Christopher Kohanyi, 16, runs Bin Rinse with his father
“It smelled a lot better. It looked a lot better. I felt good about having that done.” Celeste Munshi, homeowner
ling trash bin cleaning industry in North America — a Doral company called Sparkling Bins, owned by John and Maria Conway, and John Conway convinced him there were more than enough dirty trash bins in South Florida to keep him busy.
Conway was himself laid off from a white-collar job in 2009. Today, he said, “I own the most successful trash and recycling bin cleaning business in the U.S.”
He supervises five crews cleaning 10,000 bins a month in the Kendall-Palmetto Bay region of Miami-Dade County, including all of the bins within 15 homeowner association-controlled communities, and oversees a separate division that cleans commercial bins at Whole Foods, Winn-Dixie and other retailers.
Conway also makes and sells turnkey systems for entrepreneurs looking to operate their own trash bin cleaning businesses.
At his plant in Doral, Conway will manufacture a cleaning system to fit any budget, starting from a $30,000 machine attached to the back of a small pickup truck up to a much-larger and pricier machine mounted on a two-ton flatbed.
Conway said he’s equipped 65 of 85 trash bin cleaning services he knows of in the country. Of those, 25 were built in 2016 and 23 so far this year. He expects to build 70 by the end of the year.
“Of 20 businesses I know of in Florida, we built 18,” he said.
One is Bin Rinse, which serves Broward County out of a warehouse in Davie. Christopher Kohanyi, a 16-year-old high school student at Weston High School, said he and his father started the business together in January and so far they have 100 subscribers.
“I had the idea and my father funded it,” Kohanyi said. “I’m motivated and I love doing it. It’s something everybody needs.” For marketing, the pair depends on social media and word of mouth. “We’re getting calls left and right.”
Other local startups Conway equipped include Bin Medics, which formed in September and serves Palm Beach County; and Bin King Sanitation, which started in November in Fort Lauderdale.
A Pompano Beach-based company called Mr Clean Bin Cleaner, which isn’t one of Conway’s clients, started operating in March, serving Palm Beach and Broward counties.
Edgos first contacted Conway in August, spent hours talking about the industry, and contracted with Sparkling Bins to build his system. He committed $180,000 of his savings to the startup — $100,000 on a Ford F-350 and pressure-washing system, and another $80,000 for marketing and income while he builds up his clientele.
He signed up 70 customers in his first month, which he considers a good start, but says he’s aiming for 100 stops a day, two bins per stop. When he gets to 70 stops a day, he plans to start looking for another truck and hire a driver. Eventually he’d like to grow to five trucks, he says.
He hands out business cards while making his rounds. If he sees a homeowner wheeling a bin that looks particularly dirty, he brings out the hand sanitizer and talks about how many germs live on their trash bins.
“I’ve never seen people moving bins around while wearing gloves,” he said. “I’ll bet you any money they go back into their house and don’t wash their hands.”
Can your trash bin make you sick?
In 2007, the British newspaper Daily Mail asked a food microbiologist to analyze trash left uncollected for two weeks. The scientist found “potentially dangerous” levels of bacteria, including Enterobacteriaceae, E. coli, yeasts, molds, Staphylococcus aureus, and Clostridium perfringens — most of which can cause illness if ingested at high-enough amounts.
Notosha Austin, program manager for the Broward Municipal Services District’s Solid Waste and Recycling Program, said in an email the county “does not test for germs or bacteria and can’t corroborate any claims about their presence in trash cans.”
“However, residents that use roll-out carts for their garbage and recycling services are reminded and encouraged to wash and sanitize them on a regular basis to minimize germs and smells,” Austin said.