The hidden costs of waste are much generally higher than the obvious costs, for example companies taking part in the Leicestershire waste minimisation club easily identified annual waste costs of £500,000 but when the companies were reviewed more fully and the hidden costs taken into account the real cost was closer to £13 million/annum.

Wasted resources; wasted raw materials may find their way to the skip. Although there is a tendency to accept disposal costs, the disposal of raw materials puts their real cost to the company at a premium their disposal is considerably more expensive to the company, than merely the cost of the skip.

A waste stream may only cost £3,000 to dispose of but might contains 10,000 of raw materials one company carrying out a "skip audit" listed its waste cost as £6,500 the amount paid for removal each year, the audit demonstrated that the true cost was in the region of £100,000/year = up to half the profit of the business.

The cost of rejects at each stage of process this includes the cost of labour in the scrapped product. In addition the value of lost sales from rejects must also include the value added to the material by the time it was rejected. So costs for waste and rejects increase as the process continues this needs to be included e.g. energy wasted, sales lost etc.

Waste also has an effect on the production capacity - productivity - if time is spent producing rejects then the plant is not truly running at capacity.

Wastes that require effluent treatment and/or pollution abatement are another added cost.

Finally handling requires time, energy and effort and there are increased liability or risks associated with this.