Recycling Your Commercial Waste

A huge amount of waste is produced by businesses on a daily basis and the way this is dealt with impacts on not only the environment, but the profit margins of each business too.

Having large volumes of waste transported and dumped in landfill sites is far from ideal for the environment and the high costs associated with waste disposal tend to be quite unappealing to put it mildly!

REDUCE

The most effective, common sense place to start tackling the issue of commercial waste is at the beginning; first things first, examine ways to reduce the volume of waste being produced.

• In an office environment even the most seemingly minor changes like introducing a water dispenser and discouraging the use of disposable bottles would make a big difference over the course of the year.
• Packaging is one of the worst culprits in terms of waste. You may be able to arrange for purchased supplies to be delivered in reusable containers in order to reduce the amount of packaging you would normally throw away or perhaps explore other, similar solutions to achieve the same outcome.
• In some cases it may be pertinent to reduce the amount of packaging you use on your own products. This could help to reduce your costs and of course it will reduce waste further down the line at the same time.

Once you have exhausted all of the potential options for reducing your waste you can move on to the next stage which involves focusing on which materials you could, or should be recycling.

RECYCLE

Work out which waste materials you are producing the most of and tackle these first.

Find out what options and facilities you have locally for the recycling of those materials and make use of the collection services that are available to businesses in your particular area.

In the absence of a suitable collection service for one or more of the waste materials your business produces, maybe you could arrange for a member of staff to transport it to a recycling centre directly instead!?

Depending on the nature of your business and the materials involved you may even be able to generate a small amount of extra revenue by recycling so it makes good sense to check out all of your options thoroughly.

LAWS AND DIRECTIVES

Over the past two decades, a variety of different laws have been introduced regarding waste with a view to looking after the environment and working towards a greener future…

The Landfill Directive for example, which first came into force in July 1999 is an EU directive that has made a big impact in terms of the way industrial waste is handled and disposed of.

The aim of this directive was to reduce the quantity of waste being sent to landfill and place restrictions on the type of materials that could be deposited.

In recent years landfill tax has risen from £48 per tonne in 2010/11 to £80 per tonne in 2014/15 with the intention of encouraging local councils and businesses to develop and improve their recycling infrastructure.

Even those who are not concerned with environmental issues are encouraged to seek greener alternatives when faced with such unattractive fees for the disposal of waste!