Business Recycling and Waste Advice
The business recycling and waste advice pages provide advice on how to manage your business waste, how to set up a collection, and provide information aboutwhere you can take your business waste for recycling and disposal.
Businesses are not permitted to use the household collection services or take recycling to the Household Recycling Centres or Community Recycling Sites.
Why recycle?
Save money
All waste sent to landfill is subject to landfill tax but you can avoid paying this by sending more of your waste for recycling. This tax is increasing every year and in 2012 is £64 per tonne. This tax is on top of your standard collection costs and so the cost of landfilling your rubbish is increasing each year. Recycling your waste is not subject to landfill tax so should save you money.
A study conducted by Envirowise discovered that waste management costs businesses of all sizes up to 4.5% of their turnover, with most of it hidden in labour, storage, energy and transport overheads, so it is worthwhile for businesses of all sizes to practice good waste management including waste prevention as well as reducing the amount of waste to be recycled/disposed of.
Environmental Benefits
Less waste in landfill frees up land for other uses and reduces the production of powerful greenhouse gases such as methane which is produced when biodegradable material is landfilled.
Recycling saves raw materials and energy. Recycling just one glass bottle saves enough energy to light a 15 watt low energy efficient bulb (equivalent to a 100 watt normal bulb) for 24 hours.
Purchasing fewer raw materials means less virgin resources are used, preserving the environment for future generations.
Public relations and the ‘feel-good’ factor
Illegal dumping or evading waste compliance could lead to prosecution and public disclosure of fines and/or prison sentence that could ruin your business’ reputation.
Awareness of environmental issues is increasing and complying with recycling and proper waste disposal regulations gives a business an opportunity to promote their environmentally friendly practices to customers, could attract new business as well as helping in meeting their customers Corporate Social Responsibility requirements.
Things could be taken a step further, with recycling as a starting point to a wider environmental management system and gaining accreditation to schemes such as ISO14001 and BS 8555. These are internationally recognised commitments to environmentally aware business practices and are becoming increasingly powerful marketing aids for a business holding them.
Most of your employees will be recycling at home. Studies have shown that recycling is important to people who want to protect the environment, and so employees are increasingly looking to their employers to recycle their waste and ‘do their bit’.
Reduce and reuse
When looking at your waste management activities, it is always important to see where you can reduce waste first, and then what waste can be re-used either by your business or by someone else.
Tips to reduce waste include:
- Set your printers to automatically print on both sides, reducing paper waste
- Reuse scrap paper for notepads
- Use re-usable mugs rather than plastic or paper cups
- Refill printer cartridges
- Sign up to the mailing preference service to reduce unwanted mail
- Reuse boxes, envelopes and packaging material
Once you have reduced your waste as much as possible, think about who may be able to reuse it.
Don’t Dump it – Donate it!
Strong boxes and packaging material may be of use to people moving house, or someone who does a lot of online selling – why not offer them on an online waste exchange site. Furniture and electrical items may be suitable for reuse – why not offer them to a local charity shop or furniture reuse group. There are also organisations in Somerset who refurbish computer equipment for charities and people on low incomes.
There are a number of scrapstores in Somerset, some of whom offer free collections from businesses of clean, safe, waste materials that would be suitable for art and craft projects such as paper, card, textiles, foil, leather, wool, foam, plastics etc – contact them to see if you are producing anything they can make use of.
The legal position
It is the responsibility of businesses to ensure that the waste they produce is correctly disposed of and the business should make sure that any contractor used is correctly licensed to handle that waste via the Environment Agency web site.
Duty of Care
All businesses, no matter what size, should have a trade waste agreement with a registered waste carrier or take their refuse to a site licensed to accept trade waste; they have a duty to ensure that any waste produced is handled safely and within the law. This is known as ‘Duty of Care’. It applies to anyone who produces, imports, transports, stores, treats or disposes of waste from business or industry.
Businesses must ensure that:
- All waste is stored and disposed of responsibly
- Waste is only handled or dealt with by people or businesses that are authorised to do so or delivered to a site licensed to take it.
- Records are kept of all waste that is transferred or received for at least two years
Pre-Treatment of Waste
Since October 2007 updated Landfill Regulations now mean that no commercial waste can be disposed of at landfill unless it can be demonstrated to have undergone a treatment process.
The simplest way to provide this treatment is to remove a proportion of the waste for reuse or recycling. This can be done at source by the business, or by your waste collection service provider. The latter of these methods may incur additional costs.