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Municipal holiday events are one of the year’s best community-building tools for cities and towns of every size. But when you gather large groups of people in outdoor spaces for a fabulous celebration, you create lots of waste. It’s the organizer’s job to handle all of that waste, gathering it from distinct collection points, bringing it to bulk hoppers, and hiring haulers to bring it to materials recovery facilities, city composters, or landfills.

Solus Group, a leading online provider of material handling equipment with a special focus on the waste-management industry, is now selling Power Pushers from Nu-Star.

In the hospitality industry, holidays lead to a significant uptick in companies booking parties. After all, every business needs a place to celebrate the year in review and look forward to the year to come. Typically, that place is a hotel ballroom.

For retailers, the holiday season brings more sales, more deliveries, and, as a result, more waste. The problem grows in step with a larger retail environment; last holiday season, retail sales beat predictions by 5.6 percent. Most surprisingly, brick-and-mortar sales grew faster than they had the previous year, suggesting that e-commerce isn’t necessarily ending in-person purchases any time soon.

In the runup to 2018’s round of U.S. tariffs, many companies stockpiled vital materials and components to avoid higher rates. For some U.S. warehouses, that’s led to swelling stock and a proliferation of SKUs. Even when managers find ways to handle increased demand (some of which we discuss here[link to blog titled Tariffs, Stockpiling, and U.S. Warehouses: Finding Capacity in an Age of Pulled Forward Demand]), they’re still left with the challenge of managing increasingly complex inventory.

Nov. 28, 2018 — St. Louis, MO — Solus Group, a leading provider of equipment for warehousing, material handling, and waste management, is expanding its online library of industry resources with a new, ongoing series. Each resource page in this collection provides deeply researched information specific to the industries the company serves.

Lift trucks are getting more expensive, reports the news service Forklift Action. Several leading forklift brands announced price increases set to go into effect November 1. 

In a statement to Forklift Action, the companies attributed higher price tags to "steadily increasing costs from freight providers...and the ripple effect of recently imposed tariffs on steel, aluminum, and durable goods."

Electrical contractors can’t take the whole winter off. However, cold weather can create all sorts of safety problems for electricians — especially those who work outdoors, or in unfinished construction projects that lack heat.

Executives use all sorts of metrics to plan for changing supply chain costs, but the load-to-truck ratio is often the first warning sign of upcoming rate fluctuations. The truck tonnage index, fuel pricing trends, and past rates can all help shippers plan for future costs, but the load-to-truck ratio tends to be a leading indicator; after all, it most directly measures capacity and demand against one another.

Global trade norms changed dramatically in 2018. Multiple rounds of U.S. tariffs led to fears of rising material prices among U.S. manufacturers. Many companies behaved like any rational institution anticipating a time of scarcity: They stockpiled. The more shoreside materials they could import before the tariffs struck, the longer they’d be able to delay raising their own prices.