Dive Brief:

• A waste hauler in Buncombe County, NC, could lose its contract serving 35,000 county households due to problems with service caused partly by two employees quitting. The county's assistant manager and the county attorney recently began the process of rebidding Buncombe's waste hauling contract.
• Some Waste Pro employees who were in control of the routing decided to quit, according to Christopher Ciaccio, chief operating officer for the company. "With the chaotic situation we have from a routing standpoint, when those people left, we really didn't have enough controls in the back office from a customer standpoint, to recover quickly,” Ciacco told the Citizen-Times.
• An underlying issue is the lack of profitability of Waste Pro’s contract. The company has been picking up trash for all of the county’s 35,000 households, but only about 8,000 customers pay the $14/month fee for the service. 

Dive Insight:

Apparent failures in logistics and personnel led to Waste Pro's current state of affairs. This scenario is unusual, but not entirely rare. In November 2014, Gary, IN, city leaders terminated Waste Management’s contract with the city, based in part upon allegations of poor pick-up service and poor customer service.