How To Reduce Your Company's Recycling Costs

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Most businesses are looking for ways to reduce expenses. You can cut the amount you spend on your organization's next recycling contract by doing one simple thing: presort your recycling bin. Presorting Recyclables Your company probably has a recycling bin next to the trash can. Employees toss in aluminum soda cans, plastic water bottles and those stacks of memos nobody reads. It all goes into one bin, one waste stream that the recycling company will separate into individual components. Consider the alternative of using multiple recycling bins. You could have one for aluminum, one for paper and so on. These can either be separate bins or a single recycle container with multiple slots, each leading to a different compartment within the larger receptacle. Anyone using the bin just needs to be sure to put the waste in the right slot. Your organization then produces multiple recycling streams, one for each material, and that makes it easier for the recycling company to do its job. How Does Presorting Cut Costs? To appreciate the value of presorting you need to understand the recycling industry. Recycling plants don't work from motivations like public service or environmental commitment. They are motivated by profit. That's not meant as an insult--there is nothing wrong with profit--but it's important to recognize that your recycling bin isn't just a waste stream. It's a valuable commodity. Typically a recycling company has to devote time and money to sorting recyclables into individual components. However if you do the presorting then they don't have to. You are reducing their costs and adding value to the commodity you provide. That puts you in a powerful negotiating position when it comes time to sign your next contract. The recycler should be willing to give you a lower rate than they give to a client who doesn't presort. The Problem Of Cross-Contamination Cross-contamination is an enormous problem in the recycling industry. Recyclers don't process cardboard the same way they process plastic or steel. In some cases it's simply wasteful--paper that gets into a steel shipment is going to be thrown away rather than recycled. However there are more serious problems. Metal fragments in a stack of paper can damage equipment in a paper mill. A small amount of the wrong kind of plastic can taint an entire vat of molten plastic, forcing it to be thrown away. Presorting at the recycling bin minimizes the chance of cross-contamination when compared to the large scale presorting recycling plants do. When you take that extra second to put your recyclable into the correct slot, you are facilitating the entire process and improving recycling efficiency downstream. This is a simple way to save money in your business. Talk to your recycling contractor about price discounts for presorting your recycling bin.