Waste Training: Saves Money and Time
Alongside any new product, there has to be a certain level of training and education. Usually, it will be in the form of written directions. In the case of hospitality, it makes sense for the training and education programme for recycling to be similar to food hygiene and safety training. Although the change may start with Waste Warrior Solutions bins, it cannot be maintained without ensuring people know exactly what to put in each bin and how to treat the materials they are dealing with every day.
When business is booming and peak times and flows occur, often waste management is left lacking. If we’re under pressure and time constraints, like the 20 minute ideal wait in hospitality and 5 minutes for drinks, we automatically switch into system 1 thinking, fast thinking, meaning training is required to maintain recycling procedures. We need to make it muscle memory, a reflex to check the bottom of plastics and make sure to only recycle plastics 1, 2, 4 and 5 in Cornwall and to rinse out containers that have had food in them, before recycling. But, at the moment, most people don’t even know the difference between plastics (see image below), this is what we are hoping to change through our training programme.
Figure 1. Different types of plastic
Bottles are mainly made of PET and HDPE and these are easy to collect and recycle
Most trays are made from polypropylene and this is pretty easy to recycle too but not all councils have access to the right facilities
LDPE, used to make some carrier bags and cling film, is easy to process but more difficult to sort and can often be contaminated with food
Polystyrene, used to make some yoghurt pots and plastic cutlery, is not widely recycled
PVC only makes up small amount of packaging, but can contaminate other plastic recycling
Biscuit wrappers and meat trays can be made from a mixture of many different types of plastic, making them the most difficult type of packaging to recycle
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45496884
For us, it starts with education around what we like to call the Black Mirror of Waste (we will delve into this further in the next blog release). A lot of the time individuals aren’t of aware of how their consumer habits and decisions directly impact the environment and climate system. For example, multiple recent studies have illustrated how microplastic pollution is altering ocean ecosystems and food chains at an alarming rate. In addition, over the past eight years WRAP UK has helped save the reprocessing industry £33 million, simply by removing contamination from waste materials before processing (see Fig 2. for examples of contamination). Money, time and energy can all be saved if the hospitality industry builds the right infrastructure. The priority is to train staff on correct waste management procedures, all they need is a foolproof system, which is where WWS comes in.
Figure 2: Contamination of recycling
The clock is ticking, it’s our responsibility to hold up the mirror and alter our generations behaviour before it’s too late. I am a firm believer in the butterfly effect, in the sense that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. At WWS we aim to help people appreciate their impact on an individual level, in the context of their own lives and provide them with the choice to create a positive impact, by reducing waste and throwing an item into the right bin.
It is our belief that small consistent actions can equal massive change to the environment.
