When you are responsible for a business, the way you handle your waste management plays a larger role in your company than you might realize. By being more environmentally conscious with your business, you can improve your company’s image and increase overall efficiency, in addition to making a positive impact on the environment. One of the best ways of changing your waste management habits is by enacting better plans for recycling and reducing waste around your business. You can take many different approaches for these changes. Read on to find five different ways your business could be recycling and reducing.
1. Send Your Recyclables Out to the Proper Facilities
The most important change you can make in your building is making sure recyclables are handled properly. The first step is to place recycling bins all around your facility. All paper, plastic and aluminum should be properly recycled and taken to a materials recovery facility so the materials can be processed safely. By having recycling containers all throughout your building, you can ensure that recyclable materials will be disposed of in their proper receptacles rather than being tossed away with other waste.
2. Encourage Recycling Habits Among Your Employees
After placing recycle bins throughout your building, be sure to properly instruct your employees on which items should be recycled and which should be disposed of in waste containers. To help with this, print out a visual guide displaying where each type of items should be deposited and place the instructions near every bin in the facility.
If placing an emphasis on recycling is a new change for your business, you may need to give your employees an extra push to start recycling. Let every team member know the importance of recycling and how doing so will create a positive impact on both your business as well as the environment as a whole. With some encouragement and positive reinforcement, your business could soon start a greener lifestyle.
3. Start Composting
Any organic waste that your business produces such as food scraps and yard materials can be put toward a compost heap on your nearby gardens. This is not only a convenient method of waste disposal, but it also is both safe and beneficial to the soil in the same way that fertilizer improves the garden. Putting waste toward a compost pile will also reduce the number of garbage bags needed for pickup.
4. Repurpose Your Old Materials
Sometimes sturdy materials can be repurposed around your office instead of being thrown away. An example includes glass jars, which can be cleaned and reused in different ways, such as using them as containers for office supplies. Finding different ways to repurpose items in practical ways around your workplace can be both productive and a fun way of exercising creativity.
The next time you or one of your employees goes to throw something away, think about the ways the object could be repurposed. Cutting down on the number of objects you throw away is helpful to the environment and sometimes items you might have otherwise disposed of could potentially be beneficial to you and your building.
5. Go Paperless
Reducing all of the paper your business uses makes a tremendous difference on how much waste your company may otherwise produce. One way of going paperless is by changing your method of payment from physical checks to direct deposit.
Also try making digital copies of all of your documents and sending all companywide information through e-mail rather than on paper. While the change may seem daunting at first, the lack of needing to use and dispose of physical files on a regular basis will ultimately make the way you do business more convenient in addition to reducing waste.
Just one business making efforts toward recycling and reducing can go a long way. By making some simple adjustments, you can benefit both your company as well as the environment as a whole.
