Sustainable Waste Management – How Companies Achieve ESG Objectives

By Carmine Esposito, National Waste Associates

For investors, ESG considerations are a growing priority, and more and more consumers want brands to align with their own values. A company’s ability to manage environmental, social and governance matters demonstrates the leadership and good governance that is essential to sustainable growth.

Environmental is an important part of this equation and can have an immediate impact on your corporate ESG goals by simply reviewing how your waste and recycling is being handled. Sustainable waste management is a key operational area where companies can have an influence upon their carbon footprint, operational costs and resource efficiency.

Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

By analyzing the tonnage and fill-levels of the waste containers at your sites and then comparing these to what the optimal weights should be, you will be able to determine if your haulers are emptying containers too often. In other words, picking up or emptying your dumpsters more often than needed. This over-service doesn’t just cost you more, but it can also have a significant impact on the carbon footprint of your waste operations.

Refuse trucks are heavy vehicles with high fuel consumptions, operating on average at just 3 miles per gallon. Every unnecessary movement that they make between your premises and the disposal or treatment sites burns needless fuel. Not only that, but they also emit more harmful emissions, from greenhouse gases to small particles that have been linked to adverse human health.

Optimizing container loads across your entire business will ensure that containers are emptied only when they are full. When combined with right-sizing the container to your operational requirements, collection frequencies can be reduced from as often as a daily service, to just once a week – cutting the associated carbon footprint by 80%.

Improve Resource Efficiency

Implementing a waste minimization plan will help you to identify opportunities to eliminate waste from your operations, then reuse as much as possible, before recycling the remaining resources. Only when all of these opportunities have been exhausted does a material need to end up as trash.

An audit of all resources that flow into and out of each location will highlight where there are opportunities to minimize resource consumption, divert or repurpose materials, and reuse others – whether they are reused within your own operation, or externally. Then you can source the waste management partners who can recycle the maximum number of materials to the highest quality standard, maintaining the value of those materials.

This methodology of waste management not only significantly reduces operational costs, but also aligns your business closely with the circular economy, as discussed in our previous best-in-class article. This has been shown to improve a business’s ESG score, increasing your appeal to investors and improving brand reputation with customers.

Ensure Regulatory Compliance

Compliance is becoming more complicated. Waste and recycling legislation can exist at all levels of government, from federal to state to local. This can necessitate that businesses have different waste management practices and paperwork at their different locations. Failure to comply with these regulations can put your business in a costly situation from both a financial and reputational perspective.

The best way to ensure compliance with different legislations is to operate a sustainable waste management system that goes above and beyond the basic requirements set by these regulations. If all your sites are optimizing resource efficiency, then you will only need to complete the paperwork to prove that you comply with their requirements, or your full-service waste management partner can fill out the paperwork for you.

Sustainable Waste Management with NWA

You don’t have to make these improvements alone. National Waste Associates (NWA) can help to reduce the resources consumed by your business and put you in full compliance with all necessary waste and recycling legislation, minimizing your regulatory burdens. Our experts will help you streamline your waste operations to achieve the lowest carbon footprint, and so that the maximum value is extracted from all resources consumed.

By partnering with NWA, you can align your waste operations with your ESG objectives, helping to make you a sustainable business that is more attractive to investors and customers.

Want to make your waste operations more sustainable?
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