Modern businesses struggle with their carbon footprint, and there’s a significant focus on improving eco-friendliness. You can think of many ways to do this, but it all starts with a solid recycling plan for your business. This will lay the foundations for a more eco-conscious company by understanding what to recycle, how to recycle it, and how to ensure your employees follow the plan.
It can feel daunting in the beginning, so this guide will walk you through some key considerations when devising an expert business recycling plan.
Carry Out A Recycling Audit
Start things off with an audit of your current business recycling plans. This means you need to look at how you’re disposing of all business waste to see what you’re dealing with and what you can improve.
Be warned, this can be an eye-opening experience!
Track your waste disposal habits, and you’ll soon see if you’re recycling anything at all. It may become evident that you or your employees are throwing things in the trash that could easily be used again or recycled. Keep a note of everything, and this helps you set the foundations for a much more effective recycling regime that improves the eco-friendliness of your small business.
See If You Can Repurpose Anything
Reduce, reuse, recycle – that’s the secret to true sustainability, so you shouldn’t jump the gun and try to recycle everything you see. There should already be a commitment to reducing waste throughout your business, and the next step is to work out if you can repurpose anything. This means taking waste products and finding ways to utilize them instead of either throwing them in the trash or sending them to a recycling plant.
As a very simple example, you can repurpose cardboard packaging to either repackage new objects or use as storage in your warehouse/office. Old plastic tubs can become storage containers for pens or other office stationary – and there are many other examples of repurposing things throughout your business.
Can you repurpose everything? No, but even if you repurpose a few things instead of throwing them away or recycling them, then you’re reducing the amount of waste your business produces. It may not seem like much, yet it’s a massive step towards creating a more sustainable enterprise.
Figure Out What You Can Recycle In Your Business
Following on from above, you can start listing all the different recyclable things throughout your business. Again, it might shock you to learn just how many items you could (and should) recycle. Certain things are fairly obvious – though others are borderline unbelievable, and you’d never have thought you could send them off to a recycling center.
Some of the most surprising things your business can recycle include:
- Oil
- Ink cartridges
- Electronics
This is on top of the more obvious stuff, like:
- Food waste
- Packaging materials
- Office furniture
- Paper
- Metal
As you read through this list, you realize that it includes almost every type of waste your company produces. Think about the environmental benefit of recycling all of these products instead of sending them to a landfill site. You’ll reduce your business’s carbon footprint – and you can use this as a badge of honor. Customers might be more inclined to use your business when they see you’re taking great strides to be more eco-conscious. On the other hand, if you’re generating loads of waste, then nobody will want to give you any money because you’re contributing to global warming.
Strike Up Partnerships With Recycling Companies
Okay, you’re in a position where you know what to recycle; it’s just a case of figuring out how to recycle these items. Thankfully, a lot of waste can be recycled in the office through various recycling bins. You can strike up partnerships with local recycling companies so they’ll come and remove the recycling bins once a week. Depending on where you work, the building management company may already have a partnership in place with recycling bins for you to use.
However, this doesn’t account for other types of waste that you can’t recycle on your premises. If you’re looking to recycle scrap metal or electronics, then you’ll need to be in direct contact with a suitable recycling company. What tends to happen is you can either visit their recycling yard and hand over your waste, or you can ring them and request a pickup. It depends on what you’re recycling and how large the items are.
Either way, it pays to know how you’ll recycle the waste products in your business. This gives you peace of mind understanding that a reputable company will take it off your hands and ensure it doesn’t end up in a landfill site.
Establish Clear Locations To Put Recyclable Waste
Once you’ve established how you’ll recycle your waste products, you need to establish clear locations to put these items until they’re taken away. Otherwise, you’ll end up with loads of cardboard, metal, or food waste littering your premises. In an ideal scenario, you can purchase or make use of both small and large recycling bins – the small ones can sit around your office or workplace and be filled with waste throughout the week. When they fill up, you take them outside and throw the waste in a bigger bin.
It’s all extremely straightforward, but you need clear signage in place to inform everyone of what should be recycled in which bins. Fail to do this, and you can end up with the wrong items in the wrong bins, which leads to something called recycling contamination. This can ruin all of your recycling efforts because it means the recycling company is unable to recycle your waste.
For example, you can’t recycle glass in the same way as you recycle cardboard. If a glass bottle ends up with your cardboard recycling, then the local recycling plant has to pause operations to physically remove it from the massive pile of cardboard waste. They may also identify that your business caused the contamination and refuse to collect your recycling in the future, leaving you back to square one.
Keep Your Employees Informed Of Recycling Expectations
A business recycling plan only works if your employees know what’s going on. You must inform them of the recycling expectations and provide clear goals for them to achieve. Pin this to the noticeboard so everyone knows what they need to do – and how they should recycle things correctly.
Imagine going to all of this effort, only for your employees to carry on disposing of things how they’ve always done. You should host a meeting to reveal your new recycling plan, so nobody has an excuse to ignore it. Also, and this may sound extreme, but you could impose fines on employees caught purposely ignoring the plans and not recycling items. They won’t like it, but explain that your business could be hit with fines if the recycling is contaminated.
It’s all about encouraging a culture change throughout your business – get your employees on board with your new plans and it should all go swimmingly.
Track How Well Your Business Complies With The New Plan
Remember the audit you did at the beginning of this? It should’ve laid out how much you were currently recycling and the amount of waste that ends up going to a landfill from your business. Compare these figures against a new set of figures after starting the recycling plan. It’s a good way of tracking your progress and seeing numerical evidence that your business is reducing its waste and cutting down CO2 emissions.
After all, what good is a recycling plan if you’re not actually making any improvements? Keep tracking your progress and using the figures to find new ways of enhancing your business recycling scheme. Perhaps you notice that you could recycle more electronics waste or repurpose more cardboard/glass. This whole process requires constant improvements to make it work and boost sustainability.
Why Does A Recycling Plan Matter For Your Business?
Why go through all of this – what are the benefits of incorporating a recycling plan for your business? The obvious advantage is that it makes your company way more sustainable and eco-friendly. From a moral obligation standpoint, you feel more at ease with your business’s impact on the earth.
But it goes much further than that, too. As we touched upon earlier, a commitment to recycling and waste reduction can give your business a USP, especially if you’re in an industry that’s known for generating a huge carbon footprint. You can market your business as a more eco-friendly company, which makes it stand out from others and gives consumers or other companies a reason to pick your business.
Taking everything into account, a recycling plan is highly beneficial and can transform your company in many ways. Kick things off with a detailed audit to see how things are going right now. Then, make your way through the steps and ideas in this guide to formulate a fantastic recycling plan that reduces waste throughout your business.