Global Recycling Day is an annual event observed on March 18th. It serves to raise awareness about the importance of recycling and encourage people around the world to take action to reduce waste and promote sustainability. This day is an opportunity to highlight the benefits of recycling, such as conserving natural resources, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and minimizing pollution.
Offices tend to produce a lot of waste and we need to find solutions to deal with the waste in the most environmentally friendly way we can. Often we can reuse equipment or have it taken away for recycling. For the more day-to-day waste we need to look at separating it as best we can, so we can minimise the amount of waste that ends up in landfill or being incinerated.
At Bertling Logistics, we try to encourage recycling by offering educational materials and training sessions and encourage our offices to provide clear recycling bins to make recycling easy, we also monitor our efforts to assess progress. We measure our carbon footprint for waste each year so hopefully we can track improvements. Some recent examples of good practice are our Houston and Middlesbrough Offices, who are in the process of moving to new locations. In Houston they have arranged to have their old office cubicles reused by the warehouse they use. In Middlesbrough, they are having their old office furniture collected by a company who will refurbish it then offer it at no cost to charities that need it, thereby having a sustainability impact and a charitable impact too. In addition, as Middlesbrough now had direct control over it’s waste streams, they are now able to introduce waste recycling to the office, initially this will the mixed recycling and general waste and they will assess waste streams to see what other opportunities for recycling present themselves.
Where an office has no opportunity to recycle waste, maybe due to a lack of local infrastructure, then reducing waste becomes even more imperative. Other options are using Global recycling day or world clean-up day to remove waste from the local community and make an impact there instead.
