Local Review: Adopting Sustainable Waste Management Practices

In today’s day and age, there is a lot of (deserved) emphasis on sustainability and on taking care of the planet. This kind of focus is vital as it means that we’re taking the steps to move in the right direction for a happier and healthier planet. Businesses are one of the biggest contributors to environmental waste in the world, and so it’s very important that they are on top of their environmental waste management. If businesses are not taking care of the environment, it is a huge potential cost to society. There are a lot of hoops that businesses have to jump through in order to ensure that they are operating in line with societies and legal constraints, and installing and maintaining waste management systems to take care of trade waste safely is a huge one.

So how do you make sure that your business is adopting sustainable waste management practices that will work for years to come? You need to make sure that you have a system in place that you follow religiously in order to ensure that your business is going to continue to meet your operational targets. Whether your targets are operational, environmental or business related, you need to ensure that you are always working to achieve maximum adherence.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways in which you can show that your business is meeting and beating your environmental targets. Banjo have compiled a list of practices below:

Number 1: Develop a sustainable waste management program

This not only demonstrates the company’s environmental focus, but will guide future business decisions, by ensuring that they are consistent with environmental goals. After all, without something to measure your achievement, you’re not going to know if you’re meeting goals. You need to create a sustainable waste management strategy which is an action plan for effective, efficient, and responsible changes that you are hoping to deliver in regards to waste collection and disposal. This needs to contain and measure out a period of time in which you’re going to meet and beat your goals and targets, and you need to always be working to improve your current position.

Number 2: Develop a team of environmental managers

Part of ensuring that your business is sustainable is making people accountable for success. To achieve this, you need to appoint a team of key people who will be responsible for ensuring that your sustainable waste practice goals are being met. These people are going to be the ones who create, develop, and report on any environmental changes and updates to how your business works. Regular meetings will be required and updates on your progress should be shared throughout the company, to foster a culture of being sustainable and environmentally-friendly.

Number 3: Provide regular reinforcement for excellence

When you are developing your sustainable waste management practices, you need to ensure that you are also providing sufficient rewards to workers and people who manage to adhere to (or beat goals relating to) your practices. This is going to ensure that people want to continue to strive to make environmental excellence part of their day-to-day lives. Without this kind of reinforcement, you may find that people will consider the process too far removed from their own personal work, and so will not consider environmental sustainability a priority. This kind of controlled apathy will impact on your overall goal setting and will actually impact on your company as a whole.

I hope this top-level look at environmental sustainability and practices has been illuminating as far as your company goes, and that you’ll make great progress towards making your business sustainable in the future.