Communicating with recycling scheme users in Health and Social Care settings

Internal communication is an important part of making recycling a success in your workplace. If you completed a waste action plan in Step 2, you’ll find this a useful starting point when it comes to communicating your recycling plans with staff.

It will help you to begin by being clear about:

• Why your business needs to recycle – go back to Step 1 for all the great reasons why your workplace needs to recycle, including the legislation requiring it.

• Who manages waste within your workplace? – for example, who empties the bins? Name individual employees, cleaners and facilities staff.

• The location and type of recycling bins and storage facilities – the first section of this step will help with this.

• Which external providers manage the waste and recycling collections – and when and how often do collections take place?

• How should items be presented for recycling? – for example, clean, dry and loose.

Good practice case study from HTM-07-01 

Leeds’ St James’s Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit took part in a waste segregation and recycling project that involved more staff undertaking training and attending briefings to encourage correct waste segregation. The scheme improved segregation between domestic and offensive waste. 

Setting your recycling communication aims and objectives

Setting communication aims and objectives will help focus your communications on supporting your wider recycling objectives, as well as enabling you to monitor whether they’ve been achieved. Your objectives could be as follows:

• Raise awareness of recycling opportunities in the workplace

• Inform staff, service users, residents and visitors of your recycling and waste policy, your workplace’s legal obligations, and what they need to do as individuals 

• Make it clear how your workplace manages its waste, the benefits of recycling and why you want your everyone to recycle

• Educate, inform and motivate everyone to recycle – provide instructions and practical support on how to recycle in the workplace and for those working remotely

• Change behaviour – all staff, service users, residents and visitors choose to recycle, making recycling the norm

An example of an aim and objective might be:

Aim: To encourage staff, residents, service users and visitors to start or improve recycling in the public areas of the main building of your large hospital.

Objective: To raise awareness of what can be recycled across the main hospital building by installing recycling bins, signage and promotional posters in all public areas by the end of 2025.

Planning who you need to tell

It’s essential to communicate your plans effectively to all the people who’ll use your recycling scheme, including, where appropriate, service users, residents, visitors, on-site staff and staff members who work remotely, to help them understand how, why, when and where to recycle. 

For staff members, training should be included as part of the induction programme for new starters, and all staff should receive periodic refresher training to ensure they’re using the waste and recycling systems effectively. Keep training records, as this will make it easy to see which staff members haven’t yet received the right level of training. 

Think about the different types of staff members – full-time, part-time, temporary or seasonal staff – and their different roles within your workplace: 

• Senior management 

• Managers 

• Team leaders 

• Facilities staff/cleaners 

• Recycling service providers 

• Permanent, bank and agency staff 

• Office staff 

• Remote workers 

Assigning a named employee to take responsibility for communicating your recycling plan with staff will help make sure everyone is kept informed and doing their bit. Remember that recycling requirements will differ depending on staff role; for example, office-based staff may be more likely to recycle office paper, whereas food services staff may focus on recycling food waste and packaging items from patients’ or residents’ meals. 

For larger workplaces, you may wish to send recycling messages to team leaders to cascade down to individual staff members. For example, senior managers will need to brief managers about enforcing your waste and recycling policy, and managers may then need to liaise with waste service providers and directly with the facilities staff/cleaners responsible for sorting and managing waste for collection. Team leaders will need to ensure their staff members follow the recycling policy and reinforce what can be recycled, how and where.  

If you have one, you may also wish to send messages to all staff members via your workplace intranet. This can be a useful tool to engage and motivate your team by giving them reminders of how and where they can recycle, why their support for recycling is important and their impact in achieving the recycling targets and goals of their workplace.  

Good to know NHS Shared Business Services has developed a framework agreement for delivering waste management training within the UK, aiming to make a comprehensive training package available across the NHS.

Alongside your staff members, you’ll also need to communicate with your service users, residents and visitors. Use the principles we’ve already shared on how to engage your staff members to ensure that your service users, residents and visitor know: 

•  What they can recycle  

• Where the recycling points are located 

• Which containers they should use – make sure all containers are clearly labelled! 

Creating effective communications

Using consistent and complementary messaging across different communication touch points across your business – from education emails to signage at recycling points – can help encourage people to recycle and change their behaviour.

Using branding to give your recycling communications a consistent look and feel will:

• Provide a recognisable identity for your recycling information

• Make the messages more recognisable and memorable

• Help build credibility and trust

Creating communication touch points across high-traffic areas in the workplace helps people understand what they can and can’t recycle. To help with this, we’ve created a tried and tested ‘Business of Recycling’ identity that you can use to show your workplace’s support and commitment to recycling. This, combined with the existing national Recycle Now logo, helps reinforce recycling messages both at home and work.

Download these FREE communications resources to get started. They’re designed for you to print as they are, or tailor to include your own workplace branding and logo. They include:

• Letterhead/header - to help you promote recycling in the workplace, highlight successes and reinforce the actions you want employees to take

• Email signature – a regular recycling reminder to employees and external audiences

• Instructional posters – in A3, A4 and A5, to show what can and can’t be recycled for each type of waste; these can also double up as bin stickers to ensure materials are collected correctly

Monitoring the impact of your communications

Once you’ve begun your recycling communications, remember to review them regularly to see how much of an impact they’ve had and spot where there may be room for improvement. Note successes so that you can share them with your team and your service community to encourage them; ​s​uccess could be specific actions taken to achieve objectives or consistent, credible presentation of meaningful results. 

Above all, identify activities that worked well and those that didn’t, and share learning from this. Review the findings, and then list your key recommendations for future communications.