6 Ontario recycling tips for office buildings

Recycling in the workplace is becoming an increasingly important endeavour for many businesses, but even when you commit to more sustainable practices, it can be difficult to know how to put them into effect. Furthermore, recycling is about more than just sorting glass from plastic and making sure that recyclables get diverted from the landfill, and it’s also about making a conscious effort to include more environmentally friendly practices throughout your organization. If you’ve committed to improving recycling habits in your workplace, here are seven great tips to help you create and execute a solid strategy.

1. Appoint a Person or Team to Be in Charge

Just like you appoint a project manager to make sure different components of a project come together, so too can you have a person or team in place to spearhead your office’s recycling efforts. That person or team can be responsible for ensuring that you have the right bins and the right signage, educating fellow employees about how recycling in the workplace is a corporate social responsibility, training others about proper recycling habits, and making sure that your strategy is successful.

2. Use the Right Bins

One of the easiest ways you can encourage recycling in the workplace is by having the right receptacles with clear labels. When people understand how to recycle properly and know exactly how to sort and dispose of their recyclable goods, they’re more likely to participate in this team effort. There are bins available that have multiple streams to make sorting easy, different openings and lids for different areas of your workplace, and even different materials to accommodate indoor and outdoor spaces.

3. Place Recycling Bins Strategically to Encourage Recycling

Placement is a very important consideration when you want to encourage workplace recycling because easy-to-access bins that are in high traffic areas are more likely to be used than bins placed in inaccessible locations where employees have to go out of their way to drop off items. Wherever employees use recyclable goods the most, such as in a cafeteria or beside a photocopier, make sure you have bins there for easy use.

4. Try a Recycling Competition

Recycling doesn’t have to be a boring and laborious activity, and one way you can encourage employees to recycle and make the project fun is by hosting a challenge or competition that can turn this environmental activity into a green team building exercise. One idea is to divide your workplace into teams and see who can collect the most recyclable goods in a week or month, and then award the winning team with an appropriate prize.

5. Learn How to Recycle Non-Standard Items

Recycling, however, isn’t just about metal and paper, but also other office items such as light bulbs, ink cartridges, toner, batteries, and more. Many of these items can’t be recycled through regular facilities, and you may have to do some research about how to properly recycle and dispose of these items that shouldn’t end up in the landfill for environmental reasons.

6. Commit to Recycled Content

Similarly, you can make your organization a more environmentally friendly one by purchasing supplies, such as paper, ink cartridges, and even furniture that’s either recycled or repurposed. Beyond that, you can also make a policy to not buy packaging or materials that don’t break down in the landfill, such as Styrofoam.

Ontario recycling programs are robust and comprehensive, and there are many items that get used in your workplace that you can recycle, including standard items such as paper and plastic, as well as non-standard items like lightbulbs and ink cartridges. Along with making your workplace more sustainable, it will also help to contribute to a greener environment, and this is good for your employees, your families, and everybody else.