Film set catering: bins on location with no yard

The unit base is a rented field outside a village, the catering tent goes up at 5.30 a.m., and 140 crew eat three times before the light goes. There is no drain, no bin store, no hard standing, and no address that a waste contractor recognises as a collection point. By the end of the shoot day there are four wheeled bins, two of them half full of gravy, tea and washing-up water, standing on grass.

Film and TV catering is the clearest case I know of a kitchen where the waste problem is logistical before it is chemical. The gel matters, but the address matters more.

A unit base is a temporary address

Waste contracts are written against postcodes and access times. A production office signs a contract for the studio, then shoots for nine days at a farm eight miles away. The hauler will not go to the farm because the farm is not on the contract, and the location manager will not let a tanker onto a field without the landowner’s permission. So the gelled bins sit, or they get driven back to the studio in a van at the end of the day, which is the option most productions actually choose.

If the bins are going into a van, the gel has a second job: it has to survive transport. A bin that passes a tilt test on level grass can still slop when it is wheeled up a ramp into a transit. Dose for the journey, which in practice means dosing at the upper end of the range and giving the bin twenty minutes to set before it is moved.

What the location manager needs from catering

Three pieces of information, preferably before the recce is over. How many bins, how heavy when full, and what happens if one leaks. A location manager who is told ‘four bins, none over 80 kilos, and we have a spill kit and a mat’ will say yes. One who is told ‘we will work it out’ will say no, and catering will be serving from a corner of the car park for the rest of the shoot.

Weight is the number that gets missed. A 240-litre bin of gelled food waste can run to 180 kilos, which is more than two people should be lifting onto a tail lift and more than some ground will take without rutting. On soft ground, use 120-litre bins and more of them, even though it means more handling. The ruts cost more to repair than the extra bins cost to hire.

Gelling for a site with no water

Location catering often has a water supply for washing up but nothing for cleaning bins. That changes the routine: you cannot wash a bin between uses, so the liner does the work. A heavy-gauge liner, tied off, keeps the bin clean enough for a week, and the gel goes inside the liner rather than against the plastic. When the liner comes out, the bin only needs a wipe.

The trap is dosing before the liner is in place, which happens more often than it should when the crew is setting up in the dark. Gel that reaches the bin base directly will set around the liner as it is dropped in, and the liner will tear when it is pulled out. Put a strip of tape on the bin rim as a visual marker, and make ‘liner first’ the first line of the setup checklist.

Weather, open trailers and the drive home

Rain is the obvious enemy. An open trailer with four gelled bins in it will take on water through the lids, and a bin that was correctly dosed at 4 p.m. can be over-topped by 7. A tarpaulin over the trailer is not optional in a British or northern European shoot, and it needs to be tied so that water runs off rather than pooling in a sag.

Heat is the less obvious one. A bin left in direct sun behind the catering tent reaches internal temperatures that soften the gel and speed up odour. Shade the bins, or park the trailer on the north side of the unit. If you cannot shade them, dose slightly higher and accept the extra cost – it is cheaper than a bin that fails on arrival at the studio.

The practical next step for a production is a one-page location waste plan attached to the catering call sheet: bin count, liner type, gel quantity, spill kit location, who wheels them where, and the time the van leaves. It takes twenty minutes to write and it prevents the argument that otherwise happens at 9 p.m. on a Friday. Grade selection for this kind of mixed, high-liquid waste is covered on the SAP powder products page.