Letting a revenue stream slip away from you, and actually paying someone to take it away, sounds like bad business. But that’s what companies do when they send their trash to get dumped in a landfill.
Out of all the sustainability and efficiency efforts companies have adopted, one of the biggest shifts in thinking has come from goals on sending zero waste to landfill (usually shortened to “zero waste”).
Companies in almost any industry are seeing significant savings — General Motors, for example, has brought in $2.5 billion in revenue through recycling over four years and Walmart has cut by over 80 percent in one state alone the amount of waste it has to pay to send to landfill.
Not surprisingly, getting to zero is not an easy task. But as the examples from several companies who’ve traveled the path to zero waste show, there are some common elements to any successful strategy.
There is a common recipe for a lot of these initiatives — a little bit of material reduction, a whole lot of recycling and reuse, and a bit of incineration (also called waste-to-energy) — and they come down to four general categories that can help you structure your efforts:
- Know What You Have
- Track and Set Goals
- Find a New Life
- Put Employees in Charge
Zero waste is not just for giant corporations — the lessons that these companies and others have learned can help just about any company identify, reduce and even eliminate their waste streams entirely.
Source: GreenBiz.com
By Jonathan Bardelline