Office Recycling – We all know that we need to act more responsibly when it comes to the environment, and recycling is a key part of that. You can make recycling easier and encourage positive behaviours in your workplace with some simple and effective techniques and products – here are our top tips to help you get started.
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Appoint a Green Hero for Office Recycling
Putting someone in charge of ‘green’ or environmentally friendly actions in your workplace gives you an opportunity to engage with the employees more closely. By appointing someone to come up with, implement and manage the initiatives, you are increasing the chances that employees will follow through with behavioural changes. You can provide incentives to the entire team, and if your business is large enough you can appoint green heroes across different departments, locations or divisions and make it into a competition (who can recycle the most, who can reduce waste the most, etc).
Recycling Bins
Recycling bins are possibly the easiest, most cost-effective product you can get to help you with recycling. Essentially, you place a number of bins for recycling in strategic locations – the staff room, around the warehouse etc – and allocate each one for a specific purpose. This means that your employees will be able to place cardboard waste in one bin, cans in another, paper in another and so on, making your recycling an integral part of how waste is disposed of and waste management significantly easier. Be sure, also, to think about lower volume, higher value waste – electronics and batteries, for example – and provide a place for those to be appropriately disposed of as well.
To make this even easier, many manufacturers and suppliers can provide you with colour-coded bins, with clear labelling to indicate what should be put inside, as well as larger recycling stations that incorporate all the different bins into one larger unit and ensure that everything is kept neat and tidy.
Go Paperless
As technology evolves, there is less and less reason for businesses to use much paper. Instil a culture of really thoughtful printing for example – does it really need to be a physical copy or is electronic enough? Do you need to hand out agendas at the start of a meeting, or could you achieve the same thing with a whiteboard or an e-mail? If you absolutely must print something – think about printing on both sides of the sheet. Your paper costs will be halved, as will your recycling needs.
Get Rid of Plastic Cups
Providing a water cooler is a great way of keeping your employees hydrated, alert and engaged – but the disposable plastic cups are terrible for the environment. Instead of providing these, encourage your staff to bring their own cups in from home, use the mugs they would use for their coffee or tea, or even consider supplying a reusable bottle yourself – the costs will soon be mitigated by not having to restock with plastic cups all the time.