Reduce, Reuse and Recycle - the Waste Management Hierarchy
You've probably heard of 'Reduce, Re-use, Recycle' before! This tells us the most environmentally-friendly things to do with waste. The waste management hierarchy expounds on this with a handy graphic that lets us conceptualise the greenest ways to handle our rubbish.
Our skip hire team takes waste management seriously. Our Horley recycling station ensures that we minimise the amount of rubbish that goes into landfill, helping your business to reduce its impact on the environment and boost its green credentials.
When you're filling up your skip, consider if there's anything else you can do with the objects you throw into it!
Prevention
The best thing to do to minimise the impact your waste has on the environment is to prevent the wate from being created in the first place! Prevention is always better than the cure. Avoid any excess waste in manufacturing, shipping, packaging and other processes, and less will be sent to landfill in the future. Prevention will also improve your bottom line - fewer resources wasted means lower energy bills and fewer materials purchased.
Reuse
If prevention is impossible, then consider reusing the equipment! Damaged furniture could be 'upcycled', reupholstered and put back into commission. Old equipment might not hit the specs that you need nowadays, but it might have a place somewhere else in your business. Clean and refurbish used materials and see if you can get them back to a workable condition. It's also worth avoiding single-use items, such as paper cups and coffee machine pods, and re-using things such as plastic bags and boxes for storage.
Recycling
If you have to dispose your waste, choose a company like Taylors Skip Hire that will endeavour to recycle as much of it as possible. Recycling involves breaking equipment down into its component materials and reusing these - this might involve melting metals, repurposing plastics and composting green waste. There are many modern innovations that can help you recycle more material than you may be aware of - for instance, local NHS facilities now use an autoclave machine to disinfect clinical waste so it can be recycled, when it previously would have been incinerated.
Recovery
When waste cannot be recycled, the energy from it can be 'recovered' through various methods such as anaerobic digestion, incineration and pyrolysis in a power plant. This energy is converted to gas and electricity and can be used by businesses or fed back into the mains supply.
Disposal
The worst option in the waste hierarchy is 'disposal', which in this instance means to send the waste to landfill. 'Disposal' also includes the incineration of waste materials when there is no energy collection in place. This is the least-sustainable option, and therefore, at Taylors Skip Hire, we do all we can to avoid it!
If you need any questions or advice, then please contact us. Alternatively, get a skip hire quote online today!