Waste

The amount of waste sent to landfill in the UK has dropped by around a quarter between 2001 to 2007 through the decrease in the amount of waste produced by households and organisations and by the increase in the amount of waste that is recycled (source: The Environment Agency). Whilst this is obviously good news we are still sending 65 million tonnes of waste to landfill sites which is not sustainable.

In order to reduce the amount of waste we produce and send to landfill the mantra reduce, reuse and recycle has been widely used and advocated. The idea is quite simply to identify ways in which you can reduce the number of resources we use, one way is to avoid products with unnecessary packaging especially as 16% of money spent on a product pays for the packaging (source: www.recycling-guide.org.uk). The idea of reuse could be as simple as implementing a scrap paper policy. Recycling is crucial in order to reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill and benefits the environment as 70% less energy is required to recycle paper compared with making it from raw materials.

The Sustaining Change Programme can assist your organisation through an audit and training to identity opportunities to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill, identify ways in which various items may be reused and recycled whilst assisting with finding the best options for having recycling collected.