Retail and Wholesale
Help for your business at each step of the journey.
Guidance for the retail and wholesale sector
Change sectorWelcome to our Retail and Wholesale workplace Recycling Guide!
In this guide, we’ll take you through five steps to implementing recycling in your organisation. Whether you operate a supermarket, a small independent or online store or a wholesale market, if your workplace is new to recycling, work your way through from Step 1. Or you can jump to a particular page if you're after specific advice
The tips in this step-by-step guide will help you to:
Optimise: get the most from your current waste collection service
Plan: design a recycling system that works for your organisation and employees
Reduce costs: recycling is often cheaper than disposal!
Get compliant: ensure your organisation complies with the new regulations
Covered in this guide
- About our Retail & Wholesale Recycling Guide
- Why your Retail or Wholesale organisation needs to recycle
- Planning your Retail or Wholesale organisations recycling needs
- Calculating the collection cost of your Retail or Wholesale waste
- Setting up recycling for your Retail or Wholesale organisation
- Monitoring recycling services in Retail and Wholesale organisations
Content overview
About our Retail & Wholesale 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 sites, such as a retail chain, you may have a dedicated Waste Manager. For smaller retail and wholesale organisations, this may be the responsibility of the business owner or manager.
Why your Retail or Wholesale organisation needs to recycle
New regulations will soon require your business to separate from your general waste, and in this guide we’ll explain what to do to prepare before the 31 March 2025 deadline for businesses with 10 or more full time equivalent employees, or the 31 March 2027 deadline for all businesses.
Planning your Retail or Wholesale organisations recycling needs
If you’re completely new to workplace recycling, this step will help you work out what waste your organisation generates and what you might need from a recycling service.
Calculating the collection cost of your Retail or Wholesale waste
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 organisation produces. You can now use the business waste calculator to estimate the amount of waste collected from your organisation and receive suggested changes that could help your organisation recycle more and save money.
Setting up recycling for your Retail or Wholesale organisation
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 organisation 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!
Monitoring recycling services in Retail and Wholesale organisations
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.