Whatever your reasons for considering upping your recycling game, I’m confident that a bespoke, tailor-made office recycling bin or station will tick many boxes.
So, based on our customer feedback, here’s a small selection of the more typical advantages.
Design
There’s a lot to be said for design – it dictates how your staff, your customers, your clients and suppliers think of your brand. The ability to have a recycling bin that doesn’t look like a recycling bin, that blends into your existing interior design can only support a positive culture of sustainability.
Businesses that have goals to ‘keep top talent’ and reduce staff attrition are turning to a more bespoke approach to recycling at work. With so much airtime on our current global crisis and the need to improve how we think about waste, it’s not uncommon to hear that staff are now demanding better recycling facilities from their employers.
Lean Process Improvements
Wasted time costs money! If you view a bespoke recycling bin in Lean Six Sigma terms, by moving away from the system you might have (see image below), to the solution you could have could eliminate almost all of the eight kinds of waste.
- Over-Production: Looking at the before picture, there are 5 plastic bins, 5 plastic bags all doing the job of what one bin could do. Plastic bleeds precise natural resources from our planet and there is strong peer pressure to reduce its use wherever possible
- Waiting – The before picture shows a situation where only one or two people can use the facility at any one time. It’s not streamlined, which could lead to a human bumper car scenario – not ideal when carrying liquids or curry scraps.
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- Non-Utilised Talent – while your employees are waiting to dispose of their recycling they are not doing the role your pay them to do. Multiple bins, each with separate lids and individual bags, demand more cleaning resource. Each bin needs emptying, relining, cleaning and the potential clean up of spills and over-spills will need sorting out too. Since installing multiple bespoke recycling stations, one of the top UK energy companies had this to say (summarised for easy reading):
They’ve had no complaints of overflowing bins since the recycling stations were installed. The emptying of the recycling stations is less messy. Their cleaners are emptying the bins a lot less, a reduction down to 50% of what it was before (2 bag changes per day instead of 4). They’ve also had positive feedback from the managers on site.
- Inventory – Arla Foods, shown in the image below, adopted the Longopac system within their bespoke office recycling station. Longopac is proven to reduce bin liner wastage by up to 75%.
- Motion – There are many ways a more streamline solution can reduce inventory, but in this part example the solution comes in the form of a cabinet which provides storage of the necessary equipment for cleaning, emptying and relining.
- Extra-Processing – The feedback above sums up how moving to a bespoke, tailor-made solution can cut out unnecessary processing. A 50% reduction in the number of bin empties is impressive.
Businesses that still rely on individual, under desk bins, would have dramatic lean improvements by adopting a more bespoke approach to indoor waste management.
Can you identify with any of the following pain points?
- I need a consistent approach to waste management across multiple sites.
- I need to improve recycling rates.
- I need to improve how I signpost recycling at work with better signage.
- I want to improve the procurement process by ordering the same bins, with the same waste streams at each site.
- I’m spending far too much dealing with contaminated waste. It’s a cost I can do without and I need to find a better solution.
- I want to improve waste segregation at source, thus reducing associated Facility Management costs.
- I just simply want my office to look good and want bins that don’t look like bins.
If yes, you might want to consider adopting your own bespoke recycling solution.
Keen to learn more?
You may be interested in a related blog: What does it cost to buy an indoor recycling bin system for work?