Planning your Health and Social Care recycling needs
Developing a Waste Action Plan for Health and Social Care settings
Read time 2 minutes
Now that you’ve completed your waste audit, you’re ready to develop your Waste Action Plan. This will document what you want to achieve, how it will be done, by when, and who is responsible for each part of the plan. It also acts as a reference point to review your progress. Here’s what to include:
Work out which materials could be recycled and find a to recycle them.
Identify key materials and consider whether these can be eliminated –for example, by requesting that your suppliers use reusable or recyclable packaging in their supply of products, raw materials or ingredients.
Set SMART targets – Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Reasonable and Time-bound. For example, each department to increase the separation of domestic waste for recycling and composting by 25% within the next 3 months.
Include ‘quick wins’ to help encourage everybody to get involved and keep up their efforts.
Communicate the actions you’re taking by using our downloadable communications resources.
Encourage your employees to share their ideas to reduce, reuse and recycle each material.
Good practice case study:
In February 2024 Staffordshire County Council joined forces with non-profit organisation Grace Cares CIC to recycle a range of purchased care equipment.
Care aids and medical items such as walking frames, bathing seats and crutches can be donated at collection points at the council’s network of 14 Household Waste & Recycling Centres. The items are collected for reuse by the charity Grace Cares which provides affordable care equipment to people who need it.
Read our case study or visit the Grace Cares website for more information about their work.
Develop a system to review and improve your recycling processes, monitoring progress so that you can see where you’ve made improvements and what more can be done.
Don’t be afraid to change the plan if necessary – it’s better to have a live document rather than something that just gets filed away.
Good to know
For larger workplaces, a more advanced option is to develop an Environmental Management System (EMS), which works in a similar way to other management systems, such as those that manage quality or safety. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of your workplace, helps you identify and manage significant impacts, saves you money by increasing efficiency, ensures you comply with environmental legislation and provides benchmarks for improvements.
For NHS Trusts in England, NHS England has developed the Trust Waste Carbon Reduction Tool and associated waste planning tool guidance document as part of the NHS Clinical Waste Strategy 2023. The tool enables Trusts to create a five-year plan to get better at segregating waste so that the stream percentage split of high temperature incineration, alternative treatment and is 20:20:60. Meanwhile, domestic waste is kept separate so that it can be recycled or composted where possible and either sent for incineration or to landfill. Confidential waste is treated separately.