Hi all,
I've been talking with our SQF practitioner and neither of us are huge fans of our current trash cans. We have a few different styles in house but primarily either there is a horizontal flap on top that folds in (which takes too much weight for some trash to operate the mechanism) or a swinging vertical door (which basically necessitates pushing your hands INTO the bin in order to throw trash away). We don't want to go with battery operated or foot pedal bins for varying reasons. She has been looking into both SQF and FDA regulations for our industry (powdered infant formula blending/packaging) and cannot find anything stating explicitly that covers are necessary for the rubbish bins. Is it possible that having trash cans without covers would be acceptable? Has anyone ever tried something like this in their facility? I can see some downsides to it if the garbage cans are small enough to be knocked over, but don't see many other issues. Please let me know if you have firm counterpoints either from formal regulations (SQF or FDA citations would be great) or experience. Any other advice such as a particularly great bin design that I'm not aware of would also be more than welcome :-)
Thank you in advance for all your help!