What does your business do with the waste materials it produces? Have you even thought about it?

There are a surprising number of recycling options available – and many are listed by the business recycling website. This includes means of using those wastes to produce new products (the obvious recycling aspect) and ideas such as giving unused food to charity groups for direct reuse.

Personally, I believe in recycling as I hate seeing waste and hate perfectly good things filling up our tips. On top of that, there is the environmental aspect and a feel-good factor. However, for those who need a commercial justification for recycling business waste, here are a couple of points to consider:

• if your local council restricts your bin size, you have to pay to remove your waste materials so recycling may save you money directly
• more and more people care about the environment and ‘green’ practices so start recycling and tell people (potential customers) about it – it won’t generate sales in itself but may be the deciding factor between you and a competitor one day
• your team will appreciate being able to ‘do their bit’ for the environment so they’ll be happier and have one less reason to leave
• you may find recycling materials in-house gives you new product leads or saves you money, too. For example, making notepads for staff from old letterheads saves paper and the expense of buying notepads
• it can give you a conversation starter or topics for blogging about – and sometimes new ideas are hard to come by!

Can you think of things to recycle? I’d love to hear of your ideas and successes – I may even copy some if applicable!