5 Sep 2022
Rifling through rubbish
We’re rolling up our sleeves to find new ways to re-use our rubbish.
Our terminal’s already an environmentally-friendly building. It is super energy efficient, we measure its use of energy and water in real-time and are always looking for ways to make it even greener.
Reducing waste is a big focus.
We weigh every piece of rubbish thrown into our bins and, more importantly, we measure how much we divert from landfill.
Our current diversion rate sits at 42% (nearly half of the waste thrown out is diverted from landfill).
Our friends at Sustainably tell us that’s high … in their words “most companies don’t divert much at all and the ‘good’ ones divert around 30%”.
One of the reasons we measure so much is that it means we can hold ourselves to account and challenge ourselves to do even better.
We’re 100% committed to lifting that 42% higher so have undertaken a major waste audit. That’s a polite way of saying we spent 60 hours sorting 81 bins, bags and bundles of waste (that’s a total of 729 kilos of rubbish) from the terminal.
Afterall, if we want to lift our game – we need to understand what’s currently going to landfill and find new ways to re-use or re-purpose it. It’s all about creating circular economies.
It was a mucky job but far from a waste of time. In fact, we’re quite excited at what we found.
We’ve identified two projects that will, in time, lift our diversion rate to as high as 70%.
They involve re-using all of the single use plastics and better using the organics and waste liquids.
We’re just ironing out the details but stay tuned – we’ll have some exciting announcements in this space very soon.