On writing winning bids in the waste and recycling sector
Ask most people what goes into a tender submission, and they'll picture a spreadsheet: a price per tonne, a price per lift, a total at the bottom. In reality, the number on that page is the last thing to get written, not the first. Everything that makes it defensible happens before anyone touches a price cell.
The framework that stretched the length of the country
One of the more instructive bids I've worked on was for a large waste collection framework covering sites from the north of Scotland down to Cornwall — genuinely the furthest points of the UK. On paper, the requirement was simple: collect waste from a list of locations and dispose of it compliantly. In practice, "how much do we charge" turns out to be one of the hardest questions in the whole document, because the honest answer depends on a dozen variables that change from job to job.
Take fuel alone. The cost of running a vehicle from Kent to Aberdeen is not a fixed number you can drop into a formula — it depends on the route, the vehicle, current fuel prices, and what happens once the vehicle gets there. Was the collection a quarter of a load, or a full one? Could the vehicle divert via another depot on the way back and pick up a second job, spreading that fuel cost across two contracts instead of one? Every one of those branches changes the true cost of delivering the service, and every one of them has to be modelled before you can put a defensible price on paper.
Pricing every scenario, not just the average one
This is where a lot of tender pricing goes wrong: bidders price the average case and hope it holds. It rarely does. A framework like this one doesn't ask you to service one predictable round each week — it asks you to be ready for whatever combination of collections lands on a given day, anywhere in the country, and still hit your margin.
So the work becomes going through every realistic case: full loads and part loads, one-way runs and runs with a return-leg collection, short regional hops and the long hauls that eat a working day just in transit. Only once those scenarios are mapped can you start asking the question every business is actually in the tender for — how do we build in a margin, and how do we make sure that margin survives contact with reality rather than evaporating the first time a job runs long or a lorry comes back empty?
One collection point in Aberdeenshire — a small pickup, nothing dramatic — worked out to roughly £1,200 in transport costs alone just to get a vehicle there and back. That's before a single item of waste was picked up or processed.
That figure is the whole argument in miniature. A price plan that doesn't account for jobs like that one isn't a competitive price — it's a loss waiting to be discovered a few months into the contract, usually when it's too late to renegotiate.
Why this matters beyond the spreadsheet
None of this logistics modelling shows up explicitly in the finished bid document. The evaluator reading the submission sees a price schedule and a method statement. What they don't see — but what determines whether that price actually holds up over a three- or five-year contract term — is the scenario planning behind it: the routes mapped, the load assumptions stress-tested, the return-leg efficiencies built in, the margin protected against the worst realistic case rather than the best one.
That's the difference between a bid that wins and a contract that's still profitable eighteen months later. Anyone can write a number down. Getting to the right number, one that reflects what the work will actually cost across every corner of a UK-wide framework, is where the real work of tendering happens.
