Recycle Week 2023: How Your Greater Manchester Workplace can encourage recycling

Recycle Week is back for a 20th year, celebrating recycling across the nation and helping to encourage more people to recycle the right things, more often. Taking place between Monday 16 and Sunday 22 October 2023, Recycle Week encourages communities and people of all ages to reuse and recycle for the good of our planet, and that includes Greater Manchester’s business community.

In honour of Recycle Week, we’re rounding up some tips to help your Greater Manchester organisation reduce waste and encourage recycling at work:

Conduct Regular Waste Audits

Before you can reduce your waste, you need to know what’s in it and what can be recycled. By finding a local company to conduct a waste audit, your business will be able to recycle more efficiently and accurately, helping the environment. A waste audit will help you find out the volume and nature of your waste to work out any changes you can make to cut down what you’re throwing away and make sure you’re recycling where possible.

Reduce Single-Use Items

If your business is guilty of using takeaway coffee cups, plastic cups for water or even plastic cutlery, recycle week is a great time to stop. We know these generate a huge amount of waste for many, and they aren’t always necessary. Promote the use of reusable water bottles and coffee cups within the team and make sure you have mugs, glasses and cutlery readily available. You can even try to promote the use of reusable lunch boxes amongst your team so that the amount of single-use items used is limited.

Provide Clearly Labelled Recycling Bins

The best way to encourage recycling in your workplace is to make recycling bins simple and visible. Place clearly labelled recycling bins throughout the workplace in convenient locations, such as near desks, break rooms, kitchens and printing areas. Make sure that the bins you put in place are easily identifiable for different types of materials like paper, plastic, glass, and aluminium.

This also applies to large warehouses and industrial sites. Large-scale recycling bins are just as important as those in staff communal areas. For example, if you deal with a lot of cardboard boxes when taking in orders, make sure there’s a clear place to dispose of them correctly so that they can be recycled.

Where possible, go paperless

In the digital age, it should be easy to encourage your staff and customers to use digital documentation and communication, reducing your organisation's paper usage and waste. Advise your office-based teams to print only when necessary and promote double-sided printing. Then make sure you use email for internal memos and digital versions of reports, and other documents whenever possible.

The same goes for meetings. Instead of distributing paper handouts or agendas, provide digital copies of meeting materials that employees can either pull up on their own devices or share on a screen. This reduces paper waste and encourages a more sustainable approach to meetings.

Recycle Electronic Waste (E-Waste)

Your business should establish a process for collecting and recycling electronic waste, such as old computers, printers, and batteries. In Greater Manchester, you can’t take office waste to a recycling centre, as these are strictly for household use. Instead, SUEZ operates 8 transfer stations across the city-region which charge a low cost for commercial waste.

Every business that produces waste in the UK has a legal ‘duty of care’ to manage it properly until it’s recycled or disposed of. You must register to carry your waste and keep the correct paperwork for at least two years.

Provide Recycling Guidelines for your team

Engaging your staff in your recycling activity and clearly communicating your guidelines will help them to participate. Every business, regardless of industry should communicate recycling guidelines to employees through signage, emails, or internal newsletters. Make sure you include information on what can be recycled, where to find recycling bins, and any specific instructions for recycling certain materials.

Create a Green Team

You’d be surprised how many of your employees care about the environment and what to do the wrong thing when it comes to recycling. Establishing a green team or sustainability committee to drive recycling initiatives, organize educational campaigns, and monitor progress is a great way to engage staff, it can boost collaboration but also your sustainability credentials. If you offer volunteer days, your green team can also help with green and recycling initiatives in your local community.

To learn more about recycling in Greater Manchester, from what you can recycle to where your local sites are located, visit Recycle4GM.

To learn more about how the Bee Net Zero partnership can help your organisation to reduce carbon emissions and become a more environmentally friendly business, visit our home page.