Waste management tips for business

By encouraging reuse, recycling and resource recovery in your business, you can reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfill. Reducing your business's waste can save you money, and benefit the environment.

Steps to develop a better waste management plan for your business

Follow these steps to effectively manage waste in your business:

Step 1 - Measure business waste

For a quick visual waste assessment, go around to all the bins presented for collection just before the collection truck arrives and see how full they are. Don't worry if there are different sized bins; simply note down the sizes, an estimate of how full they are, and how often waste is collected.

For example, there might be a standard domestic 240L wheelie bin that is 50% full and collected once a week, equalling 120L of waste per week.

Once you have collated this information, you will know how much waste material your business produces within a given time frame.

Step 2 - Reduce waste going to landfill

Identify options to:

Reduce - can waste be avoided or reduced by the way your business obtains goods and services or by changing the way it operates?

Reuse - does another local business have a use for the waste materials you produce?

Recycle - what materials can be targeted for recycling?

Step 3 - Identify local collectors of recyclable materials

By knowing how much material your business produces over a period of time, and the types of materials that can be diverted from landfill, you can identify the most suitable waste and recycling collection contractors.

Step 4 - Understand waste and recycling collection contracts

You should try to secure the most appropriate collection arrangement for the recoverable materials you produce. Your first contact should be your current waste service provider, who may be a private operator or the local council.

As part of investigating what can be recycled, you also need to consider what impact your waste or recycling contract arrangements are going to have on your ability to recycle. For example, if your recycling is picked up fortnightly, ensure that your recycling bin is large enough to hold 2 weeks worth of recycling or change your contract to have your bin picked up weekly.

Think about what your current contract offers and how this may affect your waste and recycling practices. Remember that a waste or recycling contract is a legal document and you may require independent legal advice.

Step 5 - Implement material collection systems at business premises

Different businesses generate different types of recoverable materials. The bins emptied into the collection truck, typically wheelie bins and bulk bins, may not be the same bins used for collecting the material around your business premises. How you separate materials in your business will be determined by how waste is collected.

For example, if you have separate paper or cardboard collection services, then paper and cardboard will need to be separated from other recyclable materials, preferably at the point where they are generated. This requires clear communication and signage to be available to staff, cleaners and, in some cases, clients.

If your business is in a strip of shops or a shopping centre with shared bins, communicate with other business owners to ensure waste is being sorted correctly.

Use signage to help your business implement an effective recycling system.

What are the standard colours for recycling and waste?

Generally, there is no national waste colour coding system in South Africa. Local Councils and waste collection companies generally will supply their own colour. Below is a example of how most companies in South Africa class waste

4 Tips for Creating a Better Waste Management Plan

Recycling and waste management should be implemented as a resource management system, not a waste management system. As recycling programs began to be implemented in the 1970s and 1980s they were thought of as part of the solid waste collection system. Recycling programs were expected to cover their costs in a manner similar to waste collection programs: through user fees or local taxes. This often resulted in recycling program costs and revenues incorporated into the overall waste collection system, even when the increase in recycling resulted in a reduction in overall system costs, especially where disposal costs were high. Today the approach that is considered a “best practice” is to view recyclables as commodities that are managed under a resource management system consistent with management frameworks such as “sustainable materials management” and “zero waste”.

#1. Stop Thinking Waste Management – Think Sustainable Materials Management

A resource management plan is part of an integrated materials management strategy, in which a municipality makes deliberate decisions about how materials should flow. The plan elements then become specific tactics to deal with specific materials after they have been consumed. Those elements include:

Prevention

Reuse

Generation

Source Separation (recyclables and organics)

Recovery

Collection

Transfer

Recycling

Treatment

Disposal

It can also define the approaches to contracting for services and funding program services. The key program areas that are incorporated in effective resource management plans include:

Single Stream Recycling

Commercial Recycling

Organic and Food Waste Recovery

Multi-family Recycling

Away from Home and Special Event Recycling

Waste Awareness and ‘How to Recycle’ Communications

#2. Planning is a Process – Not an Event

A plan is the framework that helps us identify our starting point (where are we now), our objective (where do we want to be in the future), the way to reach our objective (how are we going to get there) and finally the way to recognize progress (what should we measure to know we’ve moved the needle). The performance of a plan in meeting its objectives must be evaluated and taken forward as a major input into further planning cycles. The objective should be to ensure sustainable improvements to service coverage and standards for managing all recovered resources. Strategic planning offers the opportunity to deliver sustainable improvements to local waste management practices because it can respond to the ever changing waste and recovered materials markets.

#3. Take a Collaborative Approach

Public-Private Partnerships for Service Delivery (PPPSD) is one of the proven approaches to resource management planning. The main objective of the program is to promote sustainable, self-supporting partnerships between businesses and local governments to support the formation and operation of new enterprise-municipal co-operation in solid waste management and recycling systems.

The main goal of the program is to stimulate improved co-operation between public, private and citizen stakeholders that: contributes to sustainable improvement of recycling and solid waste management; minimizes negative effects of waste in poor communities; and improves the lives and livelihoods of people and enterprises in cities and rural communities.

#4. Avoid the Scenic Route to the Landfill

Diversion from landfills has become a major driver for many resource management plans and recycling programs, with some states and municipalities even operating under legislative requirements for achieving specific diversion goals. However, when poorly sorted materials are counted as “diverted” from local landfills, but end up landfilled by manufacturers because they are not usable, they simply made a longer trip to the Landfill.  Verifying the fate of materials recovered from municipal recycling programs is critical to determining the actual diversion rate. Recycling programs should know the quantity of materials were usable in the production of recyclable products.

In order to ensure an optimally functioning whole recycling system, local governments must provide for recycling services that sustain all parts of the cycle, not just collection. Local governments must specify collection, processing and marketing requirements in their requests for services and in their local ordinances for hauler and recovery service providers. Throughout the planning and implementation for resource management programs, stakeholder input and feedback is critical and must include the manufacturing end markets for recovered resources.

Ultimately, the goal of recycling programs should be to maximize the recyclability of all its materials.