Our Waste Audits

The Benefits of a Waste Audit

1) Accurate Information: No good decisions can be made without good information, and a waste audit provides this for making decisions about your business or organisation’s waste streams. With a comprehensive waste audit, an organisation can make informed management, purchasing and supply decisions

2) Reducing Costs: Waste is nearly always a cost to a business, and conducting a waste audit will enable your organisation to identify opportunities to reduce it.

3) Ensuring Compliance: An audit will ensure that you are in full compliance with regulatory requirements – if you don’t know you are producing a particular kind of waste (or a certain quantity of it), you can’t ensure it is managed properly. And ignorance isn’t an excuse! The regulations and the consequences still apply.

4) Give Your Recycling A Boost: A waste audit will also reveal what you are and are not recycling. Recycling is a cost-saving method in many cases, and often a legal requirement.

5) Something to Shout About: There’s nothing worse than being caught out with a waste issue you didn’t know about – that’s what a waste audit can solve. And it will give you the confidence to tell the world about your efficient, compliant waste management and optimised recycling systems. That’s something more and more customers, clients and stakeholders care about.

6) Get Accredited: Waste audits, especially those carried out by accredited and well-regarded specialists, like Novus Environmental, can be valuable for gaining external certifications or accreditations related to environmental standards or sustainability ratings.

Whatever the size of your business, and whatever sector you’re operating in, you can see that there are benefits – multiple benefits – to getting a waste audit. From cutting costs to gaining accreditations, waste audits from Novus Environmental help your business and your people do better.

What You Can Do With A Waste Audit

With a waste audit and a waste stream report, your business can draw up an effective and relevant waste management plan, so you can be sure that everything from the type, location and number of bins to your key purchasing materials is correct and compliant.

Something Small: It could be as simple as regularly having too much milk in the break room fridge (so it’s going sour before it’s used) or that there’s a dozen obsolete computer keyboards in a cupboard that can be recycled

Something Big: Or a waste audit could find that there’s a regular unidentified stream of waste product that’s going into your general waste but actually needs specialist handling to be safe and compliant. Or a storeroom with products such as disposable vapes, which are now banned from sale and carry penalties for having on the premises.

Conducting a Waste Audit 

Just as a stock audit goes through every aspect of your business to see what stock and materials you are holding, how it does (and doesn’t) move through the business and where unnecessary expense or errors are being made, when you audit waste the same thing happens for the other end of your processes.

When conducting a waste audit, waste auditors will come to your workplace or other premises and:

• Examine your records and invoices to see what waste streams should exist.
• They’ll directly measure each waste stream. For general waste and other non-hazardous streams, this involves sorting through bins and other collectors and separating and weighing each type of waste.
• Specialist waste will be measured by volume or weight; however is most effective and safe. The difference between the waste streams, products and quantities known about and assumed on paper and the reality can be startling!
• A walkthrough of the site or facility will also identify the key waste-producing activities.
• Experienced waste auditors will be able to spot inefficiencies and shortcomings with waste management and see where waste disposal space and facilities are or are not suitable for the quantities and types of waste.
• Equipment, labels, signs and other fittings will be identified and assessed. Suggestions for changes, improvements and updates will be made.

Start Your Waste Audit Process

Waste audits are good for the environment, your people and your balance sheet. Novus Environmental can bring our experience and expertise to give you a full and accurate picture of the waste streams in your business or organisation. Whether large or small, and whatever sector you operate in, Novus Environmental can help you optimise your waste management. Contact us today to get started.