Trash Bin Cleaning Service: Is A Bag The Real Opportunity?

So in my neurotic search for interesting ways to make money I landed on a YouTube video that had the great title of “4 Side Hustles That No One is Talking About for 2023” and I was sold. No one knows these! It’s for next year! Better yet you can make $900+/day! That’s $234,000/year if you work five days a week! Why isn’t everyone on this? The only thing that could have made it better was if it was five ideas as some studies have showed odd numbers work better for article titles…

So what’s #1? Start a Trash Bin Cleaning Service. I’m intrigued. I’ve heard of this before, but living up in the North where it was -40 the other week, where Celsius and Fahrenheit conveniently meet, we don’t have cockroach or rat problems in our trash bins. But sure enough the video shows cockroaches, rats and even possums hanging out in trash bins. A quick text to a buddy and he confirms he had maggots in his last summer so after a brief search he hired someone to clean it all up. Video continues with scenes of how easy it is to clean the bins, potential door hanger marketing materials and more!

So what can you make doing this? Well the video mentioned some charge $35 for a monthly clean. And then we have to extrapolate. So if you can do four trash cans every hour for eight hours you can make $1100 per day! Not sure when you do marketing, taxes or answer phone calls, but lets ignore that. You’re rich! It’s even more than the thumbnail $900/day, we’re at $1100/day or $286,000 per year if you work five days a week. Welcome to the top decile of earners! Based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics top decile compensation is $ 78.58/hour or $163,400 based on five day weeks and eight hour days.

But in all seriousness this is an opportunity. There’s a pain. There’s a solution. I initially thought the play here would be to create a marketplace app where you could flag your bins to be cleaned and then someone close could opt into cleaning them. There’s stuff like this for everything and most recently I heard of a friends kid who opens a snow shoveling app on the way home from school and drives to jobs and shovels drive ways to make some extra cash. In fact, in the summer he fixes up bikes and sells them, so he’s on his way to crushing it.

But then I thought, if we’re paying $35 USD per cleaning as quoted in the video, or $15 CAD that my friend paid then maybe there’s a better way? Now, I’m not sure about you, but when I throw out my garbage I don’t just throw my grease covered plastic bacon package in an open bin. I have a garbage bag. It’s a little simple piece of technology that costs nearly nothing, keeps my kitchen floor clean and lets me take a whole trash can full of garbage in one hand out to the back. Pretty amazing. There’s the lightbulb. What if we just did that, but for the giant wheelie bins?

So I start looking into this and the pricing is interesting to say the least. On Amazon (first pic below) they’re selling (not from Amazon direct) for $46 CAD for a pack of 10. WTF! Are you telling me 30 compost bags are worth as much as the i5-11600 Intel processor that’s on sale and I’m waiting to come back in stock? On Etsy (second pic), $36 for a pack of 5. So $4.60 and $7.20 for one bag respectively. Cheaper than someone driving to your house and cleaning your bin, but it seems a bit ridiculous…

So what’s a reasonable price? For that the easiest way to see is to go to Alibaba to see what you could buy it for directly from the manufacturer if you wanted to sell these under your brand. Or Aliexpress if you wanted to buy from a manufacturer, but in the reasonable amount someone could consume in a lifetime.

On Alibaba a quick search shows that you can buy compostable liners with custom logos if you order 60,000 liners. So do they cost $4.60 x 60,000 = $276,000? Nope. They cost $0.05 each or $3,000. That seems like an opportunity. If I was going to start this business I would get a sample, make sure they last for a few weeks in the heat and under garbage and then try a logo that is mirrored so that the section that is folded over the bin shows your name so your neighbors know where to buy them.

I would even check comments on the videos and sites (second pic below) and realize that you should check local laws on waste water and waste. Then you would realize that there’s even services with custom trucks to capture the waste (third pic below).

But I wouldn’t start this business. Based on the Etsy post you can see they’ve only sold 440 items from their entire store and they started in mid 2021. And that’s all their items, not just luxurious compost wheelie bin bags. The Amazon ad has over 800 reviews so that’s better, but if this grows then what will happen? Glad will put a pallet at Costco for less than you could ever supply it for and you’re out of business. So lets keep looking past the next best ideas and realize that we need to find something that we can work at a long time and that’s hard for others to copy.

The rage right now is passive income. But I can assure you that the people with passive income are the ones that started working actively. It’s 11:30pm on a Friday here, this post wasn’t passive. So best of luck with 2023 and send me any interesting ideas you run into. Together we can choose a better opportunity to throw our energy and time into. Make this the year we stop jumping from idea to idea and focus on one thing to grow. Unless you’re me and my focus is sharing a bunch of ideas…