In our last article, we considered the concept of going green, and how that largely involves the principle of reduction, in various senses of the word. It was noted that reduction begins with observation: observing how others are doing things, observing how we are doing things, and combining these observations to see how we can do things better.

Today we will look at a particular type of office introspection, the waste audit, and how to conduct one. In layman’s terms, a waste audit is basically breaking down all your office’s waste, so that you can see what sorts of items compose the majority of your output. This lets you know where you are doing well, where you are falling short, and when considered astutely it will let your garbage tell you how you can do better. This is one case in which doing better can save your business a significant amount of money. For example, if you realize that a lot of your waste is composed of a recyclable material, say cardboard, you can concentrate more on recycling cardboard instead of simply trashing it. Not only is this environmentally friendly, it also cuts down on the garbage that you are paying to be taken away. Less garbage = smaller dumpster.

Let’s begin by taking a look at the basic steps involved:

1. Plan Your Audit

2. Gather Your Waste

3. Sift through Your findings

4. Consider How You can do Better

5. Revise Office Conduct to Improve

Now let’s consider each of these in closer detail:

1. Plan Your Audit

As with anything, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Planning your waste audit is one of the most important steps in the process. Planning for an audit is not overly difficult, but it should take priority.

The two major things you should consider in your planning are numbers and space. The term, “numbers” comes to mean several things. First, how many buildings are you planning to audit, and how many floors does each location consist of. For our purposes, we will consider auditing a small company’s single location, which has just a single floor. This way, you can see the basic process, which can then be adapted to a larger environment through teams of people if necessary. The second meaning of numbers here pertains to the number of people involved, on both ends of the audit. The more people you have working in the location, the more people you will probably need helping with the audit. For the case in consideration, if this single location has less than twenty people working in it, you will probably only need several people involved. There is a handy chart of estimations for size / auditors ratios at: http://solidwastedistrict.com/projects/waste_audit.htm.

It is very important to consider not only how many people you have as auditors, but who is auditing, and when. These people will be sifting through what may be very confidential material. As much as we all know that items of extreme importance should be shredded before being discarded this is not always the case. Additionally, there is a personal privacy issue that needs to be considered. In the waste audit we are only looking at what sorts of materials are being discarded, and to what amounts. Although it may certainly be helpful to refine your search so that you can determine the specific location of a type of material (e.g., if paper is your leading waste, asking “Is most of this paper waste personal paper waste from workers, or is it from a corporate document?”), auditors need to be mindful of the fact that they are going through garbage. Even if it is the company’s garbage, issues of ethics should always be courted with care. The basic point is, make sure that you have an ample amount of people conducting the audit, and that they are trustworthy people.

Space is also a factor for consideration. Walking through the entirety of your workspace can be a helpful step. It is sort of like the scientific method: Observe, make a hypothesis, and then test this. Look at your office, hypothesize over your weakest areas that lead to leading wastes, then conduct your audit to see. This also helps to look at the general workflow of your office holistically. Remember, waste efficiency is only one component of efficiency as a whole. We want to improve the entire process by improving each component.

Planning also includes elements of time. First, you should plan your audit at an appropriate time. It is no help to conduct it at a time of the year or week when you know you have an atypical amount of waste. However, although you should probably notify your employees that a waste audit is being conducted, telling them when it is being conducted will probably not be beneficial, since it will probably affect their actions.

Once you have determined how many people you will need, who will be involved, and when you will conduct your audit, you can move into planning the collection phase.

2. Gather Your Waste:

There are basically two ways to go about collecting your waste. You could collect it totally unfiltered. While the idea behind the audit is to collect as naturally as possible, there is an alternative that is just as helpful: Filter down your disposal as much as possible beforehand. For example, after your audit is done you will probably want to separate your waste outlets anyway, and since you will need to separate them for the audit, you might just as well break down the areas for your wastes before you begin. For example, distribute different receptacles for your different wastes, so that all paper goes in one box, cardboard in another, only pop-cans in another, etc. When you do this, make following the intended procedure as easy as possible, while also making it as difficult as possible to diverge from the intended action. So, say you wanted to encourage workers to recycle paper as much as possible. Keep a recycling bin by the printer/copier, have them keep smaller bins by their desks, and then an accompanying bin large enough to collect their desk bin paper at several central locations. Or, say you wanted to reduce the amount of pop bottles going into the garbage; you could put out a bin with a top that has slotted holes, which are only large enough to let the bottles through. The slots, in particular, make it harder to just toss in other trash, such as gum or little bits of paper. By funneling these elements before your audit begins, you have already started the efficiency process—making it easier to focus on any one of the elements after the audit—and you have already separated the waste into its individual components, thus saving you work during the sifting.

Regardless of whether or not you elect to separate the waste like this beforehand, it is important to keep track of where the garbage is coming from. Come up with some system to label the waste in terms of source (e.g., putting a label such as “Office paper,” or “Lounge paper” on respective bags), so that you can pinpoint your problem areas. The size of your company may facilitate entailing the cooperation of your janitors for this.

However you choose to gather your waste, it all needs to be taken to one, secure location at one time, so that you have it all there in front of you. It should be secure in the sense that you will not have anyone but the auditors exposed to the waste. This is for their protection, as well as for securing the ethical distance mentioned above—you shouldn’t have the waste out there for just anyone to come in and rifle through.

3. Sift Through Your Waste

Once you have gathered all your waste it’s time to examine it. As noted above, this should be done in a hermetic location. You should also take several sanitary measures, such as laying down plastic (a thin tarp, or garbage bags will work) over your work area. Every auditor should definitely be equipped with gloves, and a first aid kit and some form of strong disinfectant should be ready at hand. Some people even prefer to wear protective overalls, but this is left to your discretion.

The next step is to carefully separate all of the elements into manageable sections. All the paper should be together, all cardboard, all bottles, all plastic, etc. Be as meticulous as possible. This will be much easier if you use the method of doing this beforehand prescribed above. Once you have the elements separated it’s time to weigh them all in, and then add the respective weights together for a sum weight, so that you can see the proportions of your contributing wastes.

There are a number of ways to weigh the waste in, and keep track of it all. Some are simpler, such as this site’s audit form method: http://www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/deputate/airwaste/wm/recycle/FACTS/ComRec.htm

Others prefer to be a bit more meticulous, as with the procedures outlined here:

http://www.cook.rutgers.edu/~envpurchase/basics_cycle_audits.htm

Whatever method you prefer, the basic strategy is to weigh it all in, and keep track of the respective parts. This can be as simple as taking a scale from home, weighing yourself in, then weighing yourself holding a bag and subtracting your body weight. You should be meticulous, but without making this step any harder than it has to be.

4. Consider

Now you should have a pretty clear idea of where your waste is coming from. Your challenge now is to look at how to reduce, recycle, and reuse. The ways to accomplish these three objectives are as innumerable as the circumstances in which they have to be accomplished. We will consider such objectives in articles to come, but for the moment, the Rutgers site that I linked above also has some very helpful ideas.

5.Revise

The last step is just to change your conduct. Put whatever strategies you came up with during your consideration phase into practice, and conduct another waste audit at a later time to track your progress.