Annual Skip & RoRo Inspections: Understanding WISH Guidance
In May 2025, the Waste Industry Safety & Health Forum (WISH), refreshed the industry’s best‑practice recommendations for skip and RoRo inspections. WISH reflects the combined expertise of industry safety professionals, recommending annual inspections for every skip and RoRo.
Why inspect skips and RoRos regularly?
Ignoring inspections carries real risks:
- Health & safety: damaged skips can injure staff, customers, or the public.
- Legal: waste escape on site or in transport can lead to prosecution.
- Financial: every damaged skip sitting idle is lost revenue.
- Reputation: delivering poor-condition containers undermines customer trust.
Annual inspections make sure containers are fit for purpose. WISH also recommends more frequent checks for larger containers exposed to heavy wear, certain compaction methods, or specific waste types.
Why should skip operators follow WISH guidance?
WISH brings together the industry’s collective expertise. The guidance they publish is already being adopted by many of the UK’s leading operators as a trusted benchmark.
Following it shows commitment to compliance, safety, and operational standards, and positions your business ahead of the curve if requirements tighten in the future.
What do skip operators need to do to meet these recommendations?
Inspections must be consistent, recorded, and auditable. WISH recommends capturing core details such as:
- Container ID
- Type
- Date of inspection
- Defects found and severity
- Action taken and repairs completed
- Next inspection due date
For larger fleets, an electronic system is the only practical way to manage this. WISH also highlights the use of summary sheets, traffic-light coding for damage severity, and photo evidence to support repair decisions.
What if you don’t have an end-to-end inspection process?
Without a structured process, inspections quickly fall through the cracks. Containers get missed, unsafe skips stay in service, and records are inconsistent or incomplete. What starts as a few gaps soon snowballs into systemic risk.
Manual audits can’t keep up with the speed of daily operations. Containers move constantly between depots, customer sites, and third-party locations. Relying on paper notes or spreadsheets means the data is already out of date by the time it’s written.
The result is clear:
- Downtime: damaged containers sit idle instead of being repaired and returned to service.
- Compliance risk: inspections aren’t recorded, or worse, unsafe skips are deployed to customer sites.
- Unnecessary costs: new containers are purchased when existing ones could have been repaired.
- Reputation damage: poor-condition containers erode customer trust and put your brand at risk.
In short, without an end-to-end inspection process, you can’t prove compliance, you can’t act with confidence, and you can’t protect the value of your assets.
How PIN is working with its customers to digitise WISH
At PIN, our Damage, Repair & Maintenance (DRM) app already gives operators an end-to-end process to flag, repair, and return damaged skips. Every action is logged with photos and timestamps, with alerts preventing unsafe containers being deployed.
In light of these new best practice recommendations, we’re currently developing a dedicated container inspection module. This will bring inspection checklists and reminders into the platform, making annual inspections seamless for operators.
Our goal is simple: to give the industry the tools it needs to stay safe, compliant, and efficient, while keeping every container earning.
What is PIN? – PIN is a digital tracking system built for skip and RoRo operations. PIN solves the industry’s visibility problem. Operations move at speed, but manual data entry can’t keep up. Systems drift out of sync, containers sit idle, new skips are bought unnecessarily, and opportunities are missed.
PIN changes that. Every container and vehicle is tracked, with your whole operation digitised in one platform. You see exactly where assets are, how long they’ve been on site, which contract they’re tied to, and what waste stream they’re collecting. You also see how many containers are required to service your current demand, available containers for deployment, and which containers are damaged, surplus, or in deficit. With that visibility, you can make better decisions that increase sales, reduce costs, and improve service.
Our Damage, Repair & Maintenance (DRM) app is just one part of the platform. As a whole, PIN transforms overall business performance and pays for itself many times over.
Get ahead of the curve and try PIN yourself; trial options are available, and we’d be happy to show you a demo.
