It’s not always easy to keep your environmental impact to a minimum at work. When you’re in an environment like the office, reducing waste and shrinking your footprint can seem next to impossible, particularly as workplace cultures can get just as stuck in bad habits as people. With a few adjustments to our daily routines and attitudes though, it’s easy to reduce waste in your workplace.
Check out these 7 simple tips for staying waste-free at work, and help cut the footprint of your workday in half.
1. If it ain’t reusable, try try again…
Provide real dishes and silverware in the workplace and ensure teams have a disposable-free survival kit in their desks / work area with reusable coffee mugs, water bottles and shopping bags to help you reduce waste before it starts.
2. Create an anti-printing culture.
Print smarter and go (nearly) paperless. While recycling is helpful, the biggest impact comes from using less paper in the first place. Minutes from meetings don’t need to be printed for example as tablets can be used or laptops to follow notes and make comment on them electronically ‘live’. Technology can even now record and produce notes quite effectively too. .
3. Join the Spare Harvest movement.
Okay we’re totally biased, BUT to make your workplace waste a thing of the past, you can provide your staff with a way to share what they have spare at home which would have been wasted and what is in abundance at work too. What could be wasted at work, can be used at homes and visa versa. Would produce, resources and habits could your workplace benefit from which staff use at home? Get the conversation started, our platform will sort out the ‘how to’.
We’re the link that connects something someone has with something someone wants. It’s more than a tech platform though. Spare Harvest stands for building stronger personal connections with each other and shifting our workplace behaviour to waste less and share more.
4. Encourage ‘bring your own’ lunch and snacks
Make sharing lunch breaks and food a part of the fabric of your workplace by providing ideas for sharing which are simple and affordable. Bringing your own reduces mass packaging waste and saves thousands of dollars per year for your workers.
Oh! And get rid of the food vending machine with non-biodegradable packaging.. Besides it’s no good for the health of your people. Tut tut…
5. Pre-cycle your work products
Choose office supplies which are easy to reuse or recycle and stop waste in its tracks. When deciding which supplies to use, ask yourself can I recycle or reuse this? A simple change in mindset can mean lighter waste bins all year long.
Example: Paper clips can be reused, staples cannot. Crumpled newspaper can protect items for shipping whereas bubble wrap will take a millennia to break down.
6. Reuse, recycle and discover better ways of doing things
Reuse as much stationery as possible and reduce what is physically needed by looking at how your business is using technology or could be to minimise waste.
7. Purchase wisely
Wherever possible by secondhand equipment and machines (which don’t waste energy) Also, ensure you’re buying top-quality equipment that will last and not become obsolete quickly. This helps avoid having to buy new equipment too soon and contributing to manufacturing waste.
