Health and Social Care

Welcome to our workplace Recycling Guide! ​

This guide is for the person responsible for managing waste at your workplace or site. If you’re a large organisation with multiple departments spread across multiple sites, such as a hospital trust, you may have a dedicated Waste Manager. If you’re a smaller site, such as a General Practice surgery, a residential care home or a dental surgery, your Site Manager or Operational Manager may be responsible for this.

New regulations will soon require your workplace to separate recyclable materials from your general waste, and in this guide we’ll explain what to do to prepare.  Before we get into the details, let’s take a quick look at the background and how recycling can help your workplace.

If you’re completely new to workplace recycling, this step will help you work out what waste your workplace generates and what you might need from a recycling service.

If you’ve completed the waste audit as covered in Step 2, you’ll have collected detailed information about the amount and type of waste your workplace produces. You can now use the business waste calculator to estimate the amount of waste collected from your workplace and receive suggested changes that could help your workplace recycle more and save money.

If you’ve carried out a waste audit and used the business waste calculator, you should now have a better understanding of the types of waste your workplace generates and options to recycle more. You’ve hopefully also created a waste action plan, and now it’s time to put it into action!

Once you have your workplace recycling set up and you’ve got your employees on board, it’s worth regularly monitoring and reviewing how it’s going. By doing so, you can share successes with your team and customers and look out for opportunities to improve.