How To Improve Recycling In Your Business: From Cardboard Recycling To Commercial Waste Collection
In 2023, recycling is more important than ever. Innovative features like clean air zones and alternative sources of energy are now dominating the market, as everybody tries to do their part to reduce emissions and overall make the world a better place to be.
While big ideas like solar panels and electric vehicles seem like big ideas to help make the world a better place, one thing a business can zero in on to help improve the planet is recycling. Many recycle at home, but sometimes these best practices do not continue into the workplace.
As a business owner or employee concerned about the environment, it is actually quite easy to improve recycling at the business. Here are some suggestions that you may find helpful.
Recycling At Your Business
Separate Your Waste
One of the most common ways that a business falls short in terms of recycling is not giving the option to separate your waste out, just offering a singular bin that will not be recycled. The quickest and easiest way to improve recycling at your business is to provide separate bins for each type of recycling. General waste is still fine, but you should consider bins for cardboard, plastic, glass and food waste.
This way all employees can handily throw their recycling in the correct bin and rest assured that it will go to the right location to be reused or recycled. If you have a large office with multiple bins, make sure you include recycling bins everywhere there are also normal bins. This will encourage recycling even more, as somebody may be lazy and throw recycling into a normal bin that is more convenient to them instead of walking to where the recycling is situated.
Cardboard Box Recycling
The amount of cardboard a business gets through can be massive, with many having constant deliveries in cardboard boxes that do not get properly disposed of. You should try to prioritise cardboard box recycling in your business instead of just throwing the boxes into general waste if there is no space in your recycling bin.
They can easily be broken down into smaller pieces to make them easy to recycle, or you can hire companies that will come to your premises and collect all of your cardboard boxes to recycle them.
Soft Plastic & Soft Plastic Recycling
Many people do not know that there are actually two different types of plastic, soft plastic and hard plastic. Before recent years, these two types of plastic couldn’t actually be recycled together, but recently the rules were changed to allow all plastics to go in the recycling bin.
But what is the difference? The main indicator that you are dealing with a soft plastic is that you can scrunch it in your hand. This includes things like plastic wrap from products, but also crisp packets, carrier bags, wrappers and whatever other plastic you can easily scrunch up. Hard plastics are the opposite, any type of plastic that does not lose its shape.
All plastic can now go into the recycling, as long as it is clean. So if you’re thinking of recycling yoghurt pots or anything with traces of food, make sure you rinse them first or else they may just be wasted instead.
Switch To Paperless
Another great way to improve recycling in your business is to reduce the need to recycle in general! A lot of businesses are doing this by making the switch to being paperless. This involves putting all their documentation and resources online, therefore reducing the amount of paper that the business buys and uses. You can also move existing documents online and then recycle the old ones, which will help the environment by allowing these unneeded documents to be recycled into something new.
You should try to encourage computer, laptop and tablet use at your company, instead of relying on paper solutions to do your work. Get rid of your printer unless it is vital, so nobody is tempted to print and waste paper on something that could easily be online. This will also save money on printing and mean there are fewer copies of potentially sensitive documents.
Smarter Purchases
Instead of recycling in general, think of how you can purchase things smarter to reduce the waste you generate. If you are buying less frequently or in bigger quantities, chances are you’ll be left with fewer materials to recycle.
One example is milk. The backbone of the break room, a business will typically go through a lot of milk in a week. So instead of frequently buying small containers, invest in larger sizes so less will need to be recycled overall. If you’re worried about wastage, try to get an estimate of how much milk is used in a week so you can accurately buy a larger-size product.
So if you need a certain item that you know you’ll probably need again in the future, bulk buy to reduce the amount of packaging. This could be toilet rolls, cleaning supplies, products to sell and anything useful your company needs.
Hire A Commercial Waste Company
An easy way to improve recycling at your business is to hire a commercial waste company. This is a great method to dispose of waste with ease, especially if you’re a business that generates a lot of waste that needs dealing with. Commercial waste companies can also safely dispose of and recycle things that cannot go into more general recycling, such as hazardous waste and WEEE recycling.
Benefits Of Recycling
Reading all these suggestions for recycling might have you thinking ‘but why go to all this extra effort?’. Well, there are actually plenty of great reasons why you should recycle at your business. Here are some of them.
Brand Image & Employee Perception
Being known as a business that recycles can really aid your brand image. In a world where everybody is very attentive about their impact on the environment, you want to promote yourself as a business that cares. People are more likely to work with a business when they know it has sustainability and the environment at the heart of what it does.
As well as impressing clients, recycling can also help to impress your employees. As mentioned before, a lot of people care about helping the environment, so your employees may not be happy if the recycling is not up to scratch. For the more passionate, a reason for quitting a job for a rival might be because they care more about sustainability. So maintain a good relationship with your employees and retain them by recycling more.
Protect The Environment
The main reason that anyone recycles is to help protect the environment. Recycling helps to reuse materials, stopping deforestation and the mining of natural resources that are in limited supply. It also gives back to the environment, as recycled materials do not go into polluting landfills where they will just slowly decompose and be of no use.
Save Money
Promoting recycling at your business can actually help you save money in the long run. Recycling actually helps to reduce the prices of raw materials, so you’ll find the things you need will stay at the same price longer if they do not become a finite resource. For example, trees take years to mature but only minutes to cut down and make into paper. Reducing and recycling paper prevents trees from being felled, which would eventually drive the cost of the material up due to there being fewer trees available to cut.
Commercial Recycling Services From Newbery
Now that you’ve found out some ways to improve recycling in your business, work with Newbery Recycling Ltd, an expert team of waste disposal specialists, providing waste management services to clients in North Devon. We serve both trade and domestic customers with everything from skip hire and electrical waste recycling to aggregate supply.
Our services are perfect for businesses of any size, taking responsibility for recycling out of your hand and allowing you to rest easy knowing we will dispose of your waste in the most environmentally friendly way possible. It can be very easy to dispose of waste incorrectly, so working with Newbery Recycling will ensure that everything is disposed of in the right manner, especially when dealing with hazardous waste, WEEE recycling, cardboard and plastics.
If you’d like to find out more about what our services can do for you, contact us today for reliable commercial waste disposal and metal recycling in Devon.
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