Waste management is one of the highest overlooked costs for UK businesses. In the 2017-2018 tax year, Britain spent £0.89 billion on landfill tax – incentivising more and more companies to switch to sustainable alternatives.
While recycling reduces waste management costs, segregating waste can reduce them even further. Specifically, businesses should focus on food, glass and recyclables such as plastic.
How does waste segregation help to lower costs?
By law, UK businesses have to manage their waste with a registered waste carrier. When collecting waste, these carriers charge a ‘lift’ fee which varies depending on weight. Carriers also factor in the volume of the waste – for example, crushed glass would have a smaller surface area than glass bottles.
By focusing on food, glass and recyclables, we can lower costs and reduce our impact on the environment.
Food waste segregation
The UK hospitality sector wastes around 920,000 tonnes of food each year, but food waste is common among many other sectors – for example, hospital food waste. When we consider that 1kg of food waste emits 2.5kg of CO2, we look towards options such as biomass.
To make the most of this, businesses should keep food waste in a separate bin, away from packaging and other inorganic materials. This can then be collected and taken to a local anaerobic digestion plant – reducing travel time and reusing the waste as organic fuel.
Glass waste segregation
Right now, the UK (including domestic waste) recycles about 71% of container glass, with a view to reaching 90% by 2020. But UK businesses are still throwing away 129,000 tonnes each year, which is particularly expensive due to the weight of glass.
This heavy material pushes up transport costs and contributes to the lift charge. To save money, UK businesses should segregate all glass into separate bins. This can also reduce the risk of contaminating other recyclables, which in turn leads to higher recycling rates and lower waste management costs.
Recyclables segregation
Dedicated bins for recyclable materials helps to reduce your landfill waste even more. In the long term, you could downgrade from weekly landfill collections to fortnightly, thereby reducing collection costs.
Keep an eye on all food packaging and separate accordingly – for example, by dividing PET, HDPE and PVC plastics. If you use a lot of paper or cardboard, you can generally recycle:
- Parcel paper
- Cardboard
- Greetings cards
- Envelopes without windows
- Leaflets
- Photocopier paper.
The future of recycling
Waste segregation will reduce your costs and your impact on the environment, but there are even more exciting developments in the pipeline. Anaerobic digestion is ideal for agricultural waste with high water content. This method uses microbial processes to generate biogas, increasing heat generation by up to 90%.
Catering businesses are also turning to technology such as waste stations, which help to remove liquid from food waste and reduce its volume by 80%. This lessens the need for lorry journeys and helps to keep those lift charges down.
To lower the lift charge for glass, hospitality businesses may consider glass crushers, which reduce the overall volume of waste. Once again, this results in fewer lorry journeys and a small environmental footprint.
Look out for more tips to reduce your waste management costs
At hubba, we offer audits to help you monitor your waste streams and look for cost-reduction opportunities. Look out for our forthcoming blog series where we’ll be covering:
- How to use a glass crusher to reduce costs
- How to make money out of recycling cardboard, plastic shrink-wrap and cans.
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