Making It Easier For Employees To Recycle

Recycling programs can have a good number of advantages from an employer's perspective. It can help give your business an eco-friendly reputation, save money on garbage hauling and landfill taxes, and give you a better feeling about the work your company is doing. Many employees will be on board with a recycling program for their own reasons. But to fully get everyone on board, you may need to take steps to make your recycling program as easy as possible for employees to follow. Here are some tips for doing just that.

Hire the Right Recycling Services

It all starts with your recycling company. For one, they can make it easy on your business by providing the right bins and signage that let employees know which receptacles they should use for which items. While some recycling services require you to sort out plastic from metal, for instance, others have a trash hauling service as well as recycling; this allows you to throw all recyclables into a single bin, to be sorted later by the company.

Another way that your recycling center can help is by coming in to educate employees about what types of items they can and can't recycle. Some employees may be surprised to know that things like toner cartridges can be recycled—albeit, they may need to be recycled by the manufacturer and not a standard recycling team.

Give Employees Incentives

It may also help to keep track of team effort and reward groups that are doing well with recycling. It's probably better to keep the rewards in groups rather than singling out employees who are doing exceptionally well or exceptionally poorly with recycling. You might decide to weigh the recycling and garbage bins of each department every week and keep a running tally of which group has the highest proportion of recycled goods. This group could get a prize, such as a happy hour at the end of the quarter.

Designate Someone to Help

It also pays off to have some designated staff who are the go-to people to ask about recycling needs. For instance, an employee might not know whether they should be recycling lunch utensils. That person will know who to turn to in order to ask their question, and it may save many recycled utensils for the years to come.

In short, there are many ways to make a recycling program more convenient and intuitive for your employees. A recycling services center or a trash hauling service might have additional ideas on how to implement a great recycling program for business.