Most waste contracts are signed on price and renewed on inertia. A few specific questions at the outset prevent years of avoidable cost and risk.
Which questions actually matter before signing?
The questions that matter address accountability, exception handling, data ownership, and exit terms. Price is easy to compare; these four are where contracts quietly differ and where disputes later originate.
Procurement often optimises the comparable variable — price — because the others are harder to assess. But the variables that are hard to compare are precisely the ones that determine whether the contract serves you in year three.
Who is accountable when something goes wrong?
Accountability should name a single responsible party for the full service, in writing. If a contract spreads responsibility across subcontractors without a single accountable point, you inherit the coordination problem when something fails.
Ask directly: when a collection is missed or a compliance issue arises, who is contractually answerable? The answer should be one named party, not a chain of “it depends.”
"Procurement often optimises the comparable variable — price — because the others are harder to assess. But the variables that are hard to compare are precisely the ones that determine whether the contract serves you in year three."
Who owns the compliance data?
You should own your compliance data, with the right to extract it in a usable format. Some contracts trap your records inside a provider’s portal, which makes switching providers painful and makes audits dependent on the supplier’s cooperation.
Data ownership is a switching-cost question disguised as an administrative detail. Resolve it before signing, not at renewal.
What do the exit terms really cost?
Read exit terms before you need them. The cost of leaving a contract — notice periods, transition obligations, data handover — determines whether you have genuine leverage at renewal or none at all.
The Lee's view
Lee’s encourages clients to interrogate contracts on these four points regardless of provider. The reasoning is straightforward: a provider confident in its service has no reason to obscure accountability, trap data, or penalise exit. The contracts that resist these questions are usually the ones that most need asking. Signing well at the start is far cheaper than renegotiating under pressure later.
