Sustainability and being ‘green’ are important things to pursue in the modern business world. It’s a concept that’s becoming more and more popular for businesses and their customers, who want to buy from greener companies. 84% of businesses say they want to implement sustainability practices to become more successful.
The best thing a company can do to become more eco-friendly and help the fight against climate change is to reduce its CO2 emissions – but how? We’re here to show you the best ways businesses can reduce their carbon footprint.
- Create a Waste Management Strategy
- Reducing Waste Disposal Trips
- Recycling to Create a Circular Economy
Create a Waste Management Strategy
Waste management is a crucial process for businesses to get right. By right, we mean having the right methods for waste disposal, transportation and reduction. First of all, you can create a waste management strategy, which is a plan that covers what happens to waste in your business. It’s a lot more than simply throwing it away and can not only save you money but reduce your carbon footprint too.
You’ll have to evaluate your current waste management process and determine where your waste is coming from, where it’s being stored and ultimately, where it’s being disposed of. A poor waste management strategy may look like this:
- Multiple waste streams that are inefficiently stored after main use.
- Ineffective waste storage (such as voluminous waste piles that could be reduced in size) creates a need for many waste collections by contractors.
- Contractors perform multiple trips per month, from your site to a landfill.
- Waste rots in a landfill over time.
There are many areas where you can improve upon this. The biggest recommendation we’ll give is how you manage and store your waste on-site. For example, imagine you produce a large amount of cardboard waste that is then poorly piled together to be collected and disposed of. This means a lot of collection trips or skip hire, meaning a larger cost for waste disposal.
On the other hand, if you invested in waste disposal machinery, such as an automatic baler, you’d be able to bale your cardboard into easy to handle packages. Not only does this reduce the physical size of your waste, it means you can reduce the amount of skips and collections needed. The more you can fit, the fewer collection trips you need to pay for. So after a while, a piece of machinery like this pays for itself.
Reducing Waste Disposal Trips
Waste disposal costs money. Not only that, the more trips taken, the more CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. This is where waste management machinery can help solve the problem.
When we produce a specific volume of waste, that waste takes up a certain amount of space. Now, if that waste is non-uniform in its shape and size, this can mean there’s a lot of empty space in the area it’s stored.
Imagine a skip filled with irregular sized pieces of cardboard that are haphazardly stacked on top of each other – it’s not an efficient use of space. On the other hand, imagine a skip filled with small cubes, each the same size, stacked uniformly. There’s going to be much less space going to waste in that circumstance.
Now, imagine you could make the cardboard represent those same space-saving qualities, meaning you could fit more waste in the same skip. This is where waste management machinery shows its true value. When we compact or bale waste, we reduce its physical volume.
When physical volume is reduced, the amount of waste we can fit in skips and inside waste disposal vehicles increases. This means we can capture more efficient waste disposal collections, reducing their number. And when we reduce the number of trips needed, we reduce the CO2 emissions through fewer miles driven.
Recycling To Create A Circular Economy
Waste disposal costs money. Not only that, the more trips taken, the more CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. This is where waste management machinery can help solve the problem.
When we produce a specific volume of waste, that waste takes up a certain amount of space. Now, if that waste is non-uniform in its shape and size, this can mean there’s a lot of empty space in the area it’s stored.
Imagine a skip filled with irregular sized pieces of cardboard that are haphazardly stacked on top of each other – it’s not an efficient use of space. On the other hand, when you can create bales that are stacked uniformly, you will only need skips for non-recyclable waste.
In this instance, the baler actually replaces the need for skips. This is where waste management machinery shows its true value. When we compact or bale waste, we reduce its physical volume.
When physical volume is reduced, the amount of waste disposal trips is reduced. This means we can capture more efficient waste disposal collections, reducing their number. And when we reduce the number of trips needed, we reduce the CO2 emissions through fewer miles driven.
Effective Waste Management In Action
Download our guide to see what I Love Wallpaper implemented on their site in an effort to reduce the impact and cost of their waste. You can explore how we helped, the steps taken to create a more efficient waste management process and the kind of machinery used to help them.
Simply click the banner below to find out more.
