According to research, most of us care less about recycling at work than we do at home. This is a worrying fact considering the amount of time we spend in the office, where we are heavy users of heating, lighting and computers, and where we are generating large amounts of waste and recycling.
It can be hard to encourage employees to be environmentally conscious in the workplace. There’s no financial interest for them to reduce energy and they feel less responsible for the resources they are using than when they are at home. It is vital, therefore, that businesses continually inspire and assist their staff members to recycle.
We are committed to reducing our impact on the environment. Working in the waste and resources sector we feel a duty to lead by example, and over the last few years we’ve made some impressive year-on-year progress with our recycling rates. In 2013, we made the commitment to improve the amount of office waste we recycle by 20 per cent the following year. Achieving this, we challenged ourselves further in 2014 by increasing the target by another 20 per cent.
We are happy to report that we’ve achieved the targets we set ourselves each year, and have increased the amount of waste we recycle from 550kg in 2013 to 980kg so far this year, a 78 per cent rise.
Whilst we’ve made some administrative changes over the years, such as added our used printer toner cartridges to the items sent for recycling, a great deal of the improvement we’ve seen is thanks to the efforts of our staff. So how do you inspire your employees to take recycling as seriously as they do at home? Here we share our three top tips.
We are committed to sustainable business principles and have sought to find the most environmentally friendly methods of running our business from day one. We are approved to ISO 9001 and 14001 for both our Quality and Environmental Management Systems, which underlines our commitment and dedication to maintaining the highest quality standards in the delivery of our services, whilst remaining as ‘green’ as we possibly can within a competitive market place.
Hayley Bosworth is Clarity Environmental’s Quality and Manager and monitors and advises on the performance of our quality and environmental management systems. Hayley manages our ISO 9001 and 14001 approval, which gives both current and prospective customers the assurance and confidence that they are dealing with a reputable organisation that works to the highest standards.
