Pressure Washing Dirty Trash Cans – Yuck!

Any competition for the dirtiest job would include many of the things pressure washing companies have to deal with.

Pressure Washing Dirty Trash Cans For A Large Client

Many of our jobs result in contact with grease, mud, manure, used fryer grease, decaying vegetation, human and animal excrement and other questionable and unidentifiable substances.  Pressure washing can be a nasty business when we have to deal with one of these substances, but it’s a really nasty business when we have to deal with all of them at once.

But that’s one of the reasons our clients call us – so they don’t have to deal with these dirty jobs.

Pressure Washing Dirty Trash Cans At The Client’s Location

We do many jobs for trash collection companies – usually cleaning up a mess from a broken hydraulic line on a truck or compactor.  However one job we’ve done several times now is deep cleaning trash totes.  Trash totes are what some collection companies give, sell or rent to their customers as trashcans.  They are large trash containers with wheels and a lid that are easily maneuvered and lifted by the trash collection company.  When the trash company loses the customer, they usually get the trash tote back from them.  But they can’t just turn around and give the tote to a new customer without making sure it is thoroughly cleaned first.

Dirt & Residue Stuck To The Inside Of Trash Cans

And while trash totes are made of smooth plastic that doesn’t hold onto the trash, there’s still sticky stuff that gets on the walls of the tote and the sticky stuff holds onto other trash items.  This is a job that can include items or substances from the entire list of nasties in the first paragraph of this blog entry.  If you can picture trying to wash a trash can of any kind with high pressure, you’ll quickly imagine all the high pressure hot water going into the container and seeking a nearly equally high pressure route of escape – right back into the face of the person holding the pressure wand.

Yuck!

Trash Still In The Totes

Of course, there is always the possibility of medical waste and other highly contaminating substances, so our crews had to be specially outfitted with personal protective equipment for washing these totes.  We couldn’t let them risk contamination, but we had to make their protective equipment simple and easy to put on and take off.  It also had to be easy to keep clean so they could see through it while they were working.  The best answer to our needs was a tyvek suit with a hood and full face mask.

Trash Cans After Pressure Washing

Armed with the confidence of proper protection, our crew scrubbed and pressure washed the totes with hot water and detergent to make them as clean as needed so the trash collection companies new customers wouldn’t have to deal with someone else’s trash residues.  Our crew also recovered and filtered all the wash water from cleaning these totes and discharged it to the sanitary sewer in accordance with our recovery permit.

Dealing with nastiness is part of the job for a pressure washing company.

We deal with it so you don’t have to.  If you have some nastiness you don’t want to deal with, call a professional pressure washing company like Wash On Wheels to take care of it for you.