Raising awareness among employees, increasing recycling rates
Raising awareness among employees
It is a reality in many companies: there are too many or too few waste collection points, and often they are too far away; the waste bins are inadequately labelled, or not at all, and some employees simply do not know the value of the materials they are disposing of. The result is an unnecessarily large quantity of recyclable materials ending up in residual waste, meaning that they can no longer be recycled. This incurs high disposal costs and has a harmful impact on the environment.
Increasing recycling rates within the company by implementing quick and simple measures does not require considerable effort: raising employee awareness, combined with an easy-to-understand disposal system, creates awareness of the value of recyclable waste.
Take the following example: GreenCycle initially developed the concept “Wertstoffe wertschätzen” (“Valuing recyclables”) for Lidl to make it easier for employees to collect and dispose of them. To this end, GreenCycle continuously analysed which types of waste were generated where and how collection and separation could be made as easy and intuitive as possible. By doing so, the recycling rate in the retailer’s stores and logistics centres has been continuously and significantly increased in recent years.
In addition, GreenCycle ran complementary training courses for its employees and promoted step-by-step awareness-raising with detailed information in the form of brochures and videos.
The experience GreenCycle gained from the awareness-raising campaign for the Schwarz Group will also be incorporated into the adapted strategies for other customers, such as the Bundesliga team TSG Hoffenheim. Here, the waste management professionals of the GreenCycle subsidiary PreZero are developing a separation system to significantly reduce the current four tonnes of waste generated at every home game.