Waste is Just a Resource You Haven’t Found a Use For

At Commercial, we have found that there is very little that you need to throw away.  We relaunched our waste reduction programme in 2006 with a target to reduce our waste to landfill by 75%.  Through hard work and innovation, we managed to reduce it by 88.5% by the end of 2007, winning a Green Apple in the process.  We now have a target to become Zero Waste to Landfill by 2012 and are on target to achieve this within our ISO 14001 registered environmental management system.

How did we achieve this?

The answer is simply by following the 3 Rs.

Reduce

The primary way to reduce waste is to reduce the amount that you discard.  Put simply, if you don’t throw it away, it cannot end up in landfill.  We looked at our main waste streams and focused on reducing paper consumption as this was one of the largest.  By implementing paperless fax, document management and rules based printing, it is possible to reduce paper usage by over 60%, as we discovered when we reduced the amount of paper available to be recycled from 1.5t in January 2007 to 0.4t in March 2007.

Reuse

Our waste management team took on board that it is better environmentally to reuse rather than recycle and focused on resource reuse throughout 2006.  This led to over 80% of boxes and packaging being reused, and the almost complete elimination of new packaging.  This enables us to be the only company of our size in our market that is exempt from the 2007 Packaging Regulations.

Recycle

Any waste that we cannot reuse we try to recycle.  We increased our recycling options in 2009 by including various plastics and, even further than that, we helped develop a recycling consolidation centre for businesses that has successfully removed over 10,000 tonnes of waste.

Our waste programme could not succeed without everyone being involved.  We all work together to make sure that the recycling bins are filled with the right things and that we chose things that we can recycle whenever possible.  In 2009, we introduced a staff recycling scheme so we can also recycle things that are not provided at the kerbside.

We have also helped customers to reduce their waste and improve their reduction and reuse rates through groups like NISP.  This way, we find that even more of somebody’s waste becomes something useful.