6 Tips for Workplace Recycling Engagement Success – Method InSight

Why Bother Engaging Your Workplace?

Every little bit counts. Fostering workplace recycling engagement really does make a difference – to people, profit, and planet.

From an environmental point of view, recycling reduces the amount of waste sent to landfills, helps conserve natural resources, reduces carbon emissions, and saves energy.

According to research by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, recycling 1 tonne of paper saves around 1,400 liters of oil, 26,500 liters of water and 17 trees.

Encouraging recycling in the workplace has several benefits. From helping an organisation meet emissions disclosure requirements to attracting desirable talent (and customers!), engaging employees to waste less and recycle more is a valuable and attainable sustainability goal.

At Method Recycling, our new waste data solution, InSight, can help engage workplaces in recycling. From dynamic dashboards and gamification features to customisable signage at bin stations and recycling resources, InSight can help drive climate action in your workplace. Below, we look at six ways to help you become a workplace recycling champion:

1. Communicate Effectively

Communication is a powerful tool that can be used to positively influence an individual’s behaviour. Behaviour change can be a difficult, yet crucial, part of successfully introducing any new system or idea. By effectively communicating the benefits of recycling to employees, you can increase participation and build a culture of sustainability. When an individual is more aware about the impact of their actions, they are more likely to dedicate time and energy to the cause.

Effective communication starts with knowledge. Having access to accurate recycling information and waste data will set you up for success. Method InSight technology is designed to provide you with the tools, data access, and expert guidance you need to implement sustainable change.

Here are a few of the ways InSight can support effective communication:

• Recycling quiz: Recycling requirements vary across locations so it's important to understand the specifics of your local council or collection provider. As part of InSight, we will create a recycling quiz that meets the specifications of your provider, to educate your team.
• Customisable signage: Effective recycling goes hand-in-hand with clear signage. Accurate and specific signage at bin stations is critical to improving waste separation and reducing contamination. We can design custom signage to fit the specific needs of your company.
• Training and resources: InSight’s portal comes equipped with training and resources to help employees understand how to correctly recycle and sort materials.
• Waste reporting data: Timely and accurate waste reporting data can help show the impact of workplace recycling initiatives and demonstrate the benefits of change.
• Expert support: Method’s Waste Success Team are on hand to offer advice and help you understand your waste data for reporting and internal communications.

2. Create a Sustainability Team

Setting up a sustainability or zero waste team to lead climate action in your workplace can drive progress towards achieving your waste goals. A sustainability team can help:

• Engage employees and create a willingness to change
• Improve your recycling efforts and waste diversion
• Communicate the benefits of recycling
• Identify and implement recycling practices and initiatives that reduce your organisation’s environmental impact
• Take responsibility for running activities that educate and engage staff
• Track engagement metrics so that you can understand where recycling knowledge is in your team.

To set up a sustainability team consider the following:

• Identify team members: Identify employees across your organisation who are interested in sustainability and have necessary skills or experience to contribute to a sustainability team.
• Educate the teams: Provide training and resources to team members to help them build their knowledge and skills in sustainability.
• Define the team's purpose and goals: Having a clear purpose and goals will help the team implement initiatives and measure impact.
• Develop a plan: Develop a plan for how the team will achieve its goals, including specific action items, timelines, meetings, and metrics to measure progress.
• Collaborate with other teams: Encouraging collaboration with other teams, such as facilities management, will help identify opportunities for sustainability improvements and practices company-wide.

3. Run Recycling Events or Competitions

Running events or competitions can be a fun and effective way to encourage recycling in the workplace and lead to:

• increased awareness,
• improved recycling rates,
• cost savings,
• a more motivated workforce.

When staff are more aware of how their actions can impact the environment they are more likely to get behind the cause. Recycling events can educate and motivate staff to recycle more, which not only improves recycling rates but can also lead to cost savings by reducing waste disposal costs and lowering the cost of purchasing unnecessary new materials.

Running competitions provides the opportunity to celebrate successes and share achievements. By recognising employees, teams, or offices, who have made a significant impact to recycling initiatives, you can help build a sense of pride and ownership among employees, building momentum and support.

InSight can help you create content for education at events and provide you with timely and accurate information about your organisation’s waste performance. InSight also has a leaderboard feature that adds an element of fun to incentivise waste diversion. The leaderboard shows how teams, tenants or locations are succeeding relative to each other, driving friendly competition.

4. Display Your Waste KPIs

Key performance indicators that demonstrate how your organisation is tracking toward your sustainability goals can go a long way in motivating employee engagement. By making KPI information transparent and easily available to staff, everyone in the workplace becomes accountable and more conscious of their actions. Achieving KPIs and displaying this data openly, also helps demonstrate your commitment to zero waste goals.

InSight’s data collection technology is equipped with an analytics portal that makes it easy to report reliably and regularly on the progress of your waste diversion. Accurate bin-by-bin data across floors, buildings and countries is a clear and simple way to track goals, meet milestones, and measure impact.

Along with the analytics side, InSight has a team-facing dashboard that provides a visual opportunity to display your waste KPIs to staff and visitors alike. The dashboard can be set up as a rotating digital display near bin stations where users can actively see the impact of their actions, learn about key waste metrics, discover recycling tips, and measure progress via a leaderboard. The dashboard can display such data as:

• Waste per bin in kilograms and percentage of total waste
• A weekly comparison of waste trends
• Total landfill diversion
• A leaderboard of sites or stations in your organisation

5. Share Your Sustainability Goals

By sharing your organisation’s sustainability goals with employees, and displaying KPI data and milestones openly, you can demonstrate your commitment to zero waste goals. The impact of communications on behaviour change is powerful, particularly when it comes from management. Sharing sustainability goals and progress could be regularly included in:

• Company newsletters
• Team meetings and events
• CEO updates

Sharing sustainability goals is not only a motivating factor for employees to participate in workplace recycling but by prioritising sustainability initiatives you can help improve brand reputation and attract customers, or employees, who value environmental responsibility. Research from the World Green Building Council found that tenants with cleaner, greener, and healthier workplaces have improved productivity and job satisfaction.

Attaining sustainability certifications is a key goal for many organisation’s. InSight is an approved data provider for NABERS Waste Ratings – a respected green-building industry certification. Featuring granular bin-by-bin data with automated cloud-based reporting metrics, InSight’s world-leading data collection technology makes meeting ESG requirements and attaining certifications more efficient and accurate than ever before.

6. Gamify Your Waste

Current dialogue in the media around climate change and a suffering planet can be overwhelming. Sometimes people can feel hopeless and discouraged in taking environmental action. Gamification is one tool that can help change those negative emotions into positive responses, which in turn, encourages individuals and teams to be more motivated in workplace recycling. Read more about how to gamify waste: make office recycling fun to meet targets faster.

InSight has been designed with the capability to gamify waste diversion. The InSight leaderboard incentivises recycling and motivates behaviour change in the workplace by adding an element of fun. The leaderboard opens the door to friendly competition and goal-setting by displaying how teams, tenants or locations are succeeding relative to each other, and to your organisation’s waste reduction goals.

By displaying the leaderboard digitally via a TV or tablet at a bin station, employees can actively track progress. Simply showing success in this way can foster a greater sense of control and fulfilment. InSight lets you bring the motivating spirit of friendly competition to your recycling behaviour change and climate action programmes.