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The future of Waste Management in the workplace

The time to act is now in the global commitment to stop climate change. By recycling creatively with the support of industry specialists and ensuring your commitment extends to your supply chain, every business can make a difference.

By Nina Wyers, Marketing & Brand Director at The Floorbrite Group

Increasingly, individuals, governments, organisations and businesses are focused on green solutions, With climate change being at the forefront of world leader’s agendas, the time for businesses to act is now. The global demand for energy is set to increase by 4.6% in 2021. Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded this century unless business leaders and policymakers explore the actions they should be taking to help achieve a net-zero economy. What can companies do to support the global commitment to reducing CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases?

Recycling helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing energy consumption. Using recycled materials to make new products reduces the need for virgin materials. This avoids greenhouse gas emissions that would result from extracting or mining virgin materials.

In 2015, The Floorbrite Group introduced our Waste and Environmental Management division to our portfolio of cleaning and facility services. We believe this new service complimented our daily cleaning service offering. If our cleaners are transferring internal waste to external skips and bins, surely, we could work creatively and innovatively with our customers to find bespoke, recycling lead solutions for their waste, whether that be for re-use in some way or waste to energy.

Our Environmental Consultant Trudie Williams who first created our waste team is passionate about the environment and delivers our unique award-winning service by working with our customers to understand how they work and offering a range of services covering trade waste removal, recycling, food waste removal, secure shredding, hazardous waste and diversion from landfill.

We can offer a bespoke waste management package unique to any business’s requirements, with a focus on achieving their specific environmental goals. We create programmes for managing internal and external recycling and can offer baling and compaction equipment on site to reduce your waste footprint before it even travels. Accurate environmental reports can also be produced for your business showing tonnages per month produced by your site and a breakdown of each waste stream. By measuring waste on a monthly basis, we can ensure a reduction of your landfill disposal.

Our team have provided award-winning solutions by recycling used and worn lorry trailer mud flaps and curtain sides into rubber pellets for children’s playground flooring and material for fashion bags. Broken tea bag waste from the manufacturing process has been recycled for animal bedding. Waste tea leaf dust is used as an additive in fertiliser. By reclassifying safe sludge waste produced in a pumping station at a power station we have safely disposed of the waste through land spreading. Reducing single use plastic milk bottles on a site by 300 bottles per week has been achieved with the introduction of cooling vending, food waste is collected weekly and sent to an anaerobic digestion plant to produce biogas for energy and bio fertiliser. We introduced closed loop recycling by installing bailing machines at a number of retail distribution sites to recycle waste plastic into pellets to be remade into new plastic mailing bags. And finally, we are reclaiming metal shavings and oil from grinding waste at an engineering manufacturer, by separating the oil from the grinding waste and recycling the metal shavings back into the manufacturing process. Oil waste is then extracted from the soaking pads and both these elements are then also recycled, where previously the whole process produced a dirty sludge classed as hazardous waste which couldn’t by recycled, these are to name a few.

Did you know that Floorbrite are International Green World Ambassadors and Award Winners?
Since 2015, Floorbrite have entered the The Green Organisation’s prestigious Green Apple Awards and consequently won each year since, with presentations at The Houses of Parliament. Through our innovation in delivering bespoke, recycling led waste and environmental management services to our clients, we have now become Green World Ambassadors and gone on to win further International Green World Awards each year, collecting the first in Dubai in 2017. Our winning projects for environmental best practice are also published in the annual Green Book produced each year.

To find out more about all our service, please visit: www.floorbrite.co.uk