Reclaiming Time: How WATS Streamlines Waste Reporting

Discover how WATS saved companies across different industries an average of 40 hours to complete their waste reporting.

“WATS gave us our time back. Reporting used to be a scramble—now it’s just a download.”

— WATS Client

40 hours

Average time saved in a year

BUSINESS DETAILS

Commercial Real Estate

  • 34 office sites in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco

Municipality

  • 60 municipally owned and operated facilities across a municipal area

Manufacturing

  • 5 international manufacturing locations

Challenge

Across industries, WATS clients were facing the same time-consuming struggle: annual waste reporting.

Whether for internal ESG tracking, regulatory compliance, or certifications like TRUE and GRESB, teams had to gather a year’s worth of waste data from multiple vendors—often across dozens of sites—and make sense of it.

The process was manual and fragmented:

  1. Chasing down data from haulers and service providers

  2. Digitizing data from PDFs, spreadsheets, and scans, often manually and into Excel

  3. Reformatting the information to match existing reporting templates and requirements

It wasn’t just tedious—it diverted valuable sustainability team hours away from strategic work like waste reduction planning, employee engagement, and other climate initiatives.

Solution

WATS streamlined the entire process, replacing complexity and spreadsheets with automation and clarity.

Clients used WATS to:

  1. Automatically digitize and standardize waste data using OCR and machine learning

  2. Monitor data completeness throughout the year with real-time data gap tracking

  3. Export clean, organized data in any format—whether for ESG platforms, audits, or internal reporting needs

With WATS, what used to take days of data wrangling could now be handled in minutes—without sacrificing accuracy or control.

Results

Using WATS, these clients saved an average of 40 hours per year on reporting alone—freeing up time for the work that truly matters.

Instead of spending their busiest season buried in spreadsheets, teams could focus on launching new diversion programs, meeting compliance milestones, and driving broader sustainability outcomes.

One client put it simply: “WATS gave us our time back. Reporting used to be a scramble—now it’s just a download.”

And now that their systems are set up, the benefits compound—each reporting cycle gets easier, faster, and more reliable.