Improving your company’s recycling is a great way to help the environment and make a positive change in your business. Overhauling your recycling processes isn’t always the easiest thing, though, and it will take time and effort from you and your employees.
However, by taking these steps, you can make a big difference in the amount of waste you are sending to landfills, improving your green credentials and making a positive impact on the environment.
Here are 6 ways to encourage recycling in your company.
 1. Perform a Waste Management Audit
It’s hard to know if you’re making improvements if you don’t know where your starting point was. This means a great place to begin is by taking an audit of your waste management procedures.
Find out how much waste you are creating, how much you are recycling, and conduct surveys with your employees to find out where they think your company can be doing better. It’s your employees who are generally the most involved with the day to day recycling procedures, so it’s important to find out their thoughts on what works and what doesn’t.
2. Get Staff to Buy-In
This is a great time to get your staff to buy into your goals of improving your company’s levels of recycling.
While you want to improve your recycling, you also don’t want to make your employees’ jobs more difficult by making recycling overly complicated, so you want to make sure you’re working in conjunction with your staff.
If you can’t get your staff to buy into the plan, then it doesn’t really matter what procedures you put in place, the chances are they’re not going to work. Involving the employees that are heavily involved with the recycling process in the waste management audit is a good way of getting them onside early on.
3. Business Culture
If you want to make a big, lasting change to your recycling program, then you’ve got to adopt it into your company culture. When you walk into an office or factory, you pretty quickly get a good idea of that company’s culture. If people walk into your business and get the sense that recycling is a big part of your business culture, then you know you’re on the right track.
You can enact changes to your policies, and they might have some success, but if it’s not a part of the culture of your business, then it’s going to be more difficult to make those changes stick in the long-term.
4. Set Goals
Improving your recycling is very similar to improving any function of your business. You need to understand your current performance and set goals to work to. Just as you would write a business plan, you should have some kind of recycling plan that lists your goals — you need to have the best recycling equipment such as Balers and conveyors.
Your goals need to be SMART, which means they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. When you set good goals, you’ve got something to push you on to do better, and it will be much easier to make positive changes.
Companies like Asia Pulp and Paper, also known as APP, have developed ambitious sustainability goals as part of their overall strategy. As their business grows, it continues to strive for new sustainability standards company-wide.
5. Talk About Your Success
There’s nothing wrong with talking about your success. It makes people proud to work for a company that is making positive changes, so let people know when you’re doing a good job. If you can show how much you’ve improved your recycling, then it might just encourage other companies to follow suit.
Businesses don’t just improve their recycling for altruistic purposes, and that’s ok. Improving your recycling is a good thing, and you should be enthusiastic about talking about your success.
6. Reward Good Performance
You can say that the reward is in the fact you’re helping the planet, but it’s always much easier to achieve your goals if you reward yourself when you’re doing well. If your company is going to make a big change to its recycling habits, then there are a lot of people who are going to have to work hard in order to facilitate those changes.
If someone was going above and beyond to make extra sales, you would reward them, so find similar ways to reward people who go above and beyond to improve your company’s recycling.
The rewards don’t have to be huge, but recognizing people for their hard work can make a huge difference.
