When supply chain and inflation issues began to hinder Western Elite’s ability to get dumpsters, the waste collection and recycling company took matters into its own hands.
It started to make its own.
The Las Vegas company has a dedicated team of seven full-time employees exclusively making about five 40-yard-long mega-dumpsters each week.
It’s just one story of how an area company has had to pivot in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which led to global supply chain backups for everything from computer chips to steel. The organization specializes in construction site and demolition waste collection, and also collects food waste for multiple resort properties on the Strip.
“We were ordering our containers, and the length of time it was taking to get them kept going up,” said Scott Seastrand, vice president. “It went from six weeks to 14 weeks, then to 18 weeks. It was getting hard for us to have product security for our customers. We didn’t want to run out of equipment.”
Not only were there significant order backups for new dumpsters, but they also doubled in price from what the company had been paying before the pandemic.
Seastrand, who has been with the company for 20 years, said last year, Western Elite leadership started looking for ways to make it easier to get dumpsters. Travis Seward, the company’s maintenance director, took matters into his own hands.
“I’ve been with the company for six years, and we had talked about building 40-yard dumpsters in the past,” Seward said. “It was kind of a goal. We just said, ‘Let’s we if we can build these.’”
Western Elite employees already worked to repair holes and various other imperfections on existing containers, so it wasn’t a giant leap to build them from scratch. Seward said he and a small crew of employees started work on constructing new dumpsters in March 2021.
The first container was finished about a year ago. Since January, about 80 of the containers have been put into service, Seward said.
The containers are constructed at a Western Elite manufacturing facility in an industrial area on the north side of the Las Vegas Valley. In addition to welders assembling various metal sheets together, the process also includes a special computerized machine called a plasma table that can be used to precisely cut pieces of steel.
“The plasma table cost a lot, but it really helped to quicken the process,” Seward said.
A 40-yard dumpster, which can hold 13 tons of material, can be rented for seven days for about $500. An additional week would run $75, according to the Western Elite website.
Seastrand said it’s possible that Western Elite could eventually scale the operation and market the containers, but the focus now is on creating supply for the company’s own needs.
“The key element in why we wanted to do this was to be able to control our ability to service our customer,” Seastrand said. “We also thought we could save some money, and we are saving money. Plus, we’ve created jobs, and all that money we were kicking off to other states, we’re now keeping the money here in Southern Nevada.”
The company has its own landfill about an hour’s drive from North Las Vegas. It also has a pig farm, which is where some of the food waste it collects from the Strip ends up.
“The way the pandemic shut down Southern Nevada for a time, it was very out of the norm,” Seastrand said. “I remember when I rode my bicycle down the Strip in 2020. There wasn’t anybody there. Can anyone pre-figure out how to get through something like that? I don’t think so, but you can be versatile enough to respond. That’s the real trick, and there are many examples of businesses in the Valley that have done that.”
Seastrand said demand for the company’s services and containers is high.
Western Elite plans to build more 15-yard dumpsters, which are slightly bigger than what might be found at an apartment complex trash collection area or out of the back door of a business.
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