Most of us are in the habit of recycling at home, but it’s often not as easy to recycle when we’re at work or out and about. At work we become immersed in daily tasks and demands; less aware of the part we can play in helping to reduce the impact on the environment.

But making your office more sustainable doesn’t have to be hard, or time consuming. In fact there are a few easy steps you can take to help boost recycling in your work place, and to celebrate Green Office Week 2013 Every Can Counts is helping offices do just that!

The average office worker recycles five drinks cans per month. Each one could be recycled and back on sale as another can in just six weeks, saving energy and raw materials. So, recycling your empty drinks cans is just one simple but really effective way of making every can count, and that’s why we’ve launched a fun competition to help offices recycle their cans and actively think about recycling in the workplace.

We’re challenging offices to brighten their workplaces and grow their very own garden in their used drinks cans. We’re providing offices with a seedling kit, with soil and seeds to get started. Your garden could be just one can on your desk or a whole garden of can plant pots on your windowsill. Workplaces can have a bit of fun by submitting photos of their efforts to the Every Can Counts Twitter or Facebook page, to be in with a chance of winning a month’s supply of drinks cans*!

We will also support your office with your recycling by providing a free recycling box for the rest of your cans and arrange for them to be collected, if necessary. The triumphant office which recycles the most cans over the summer will also win a month’s supply of drinks cans*.

With everyone working together to reduce their waste, recycling can be a great way to inspire a team. Research commissioned by Green Office Week found that one of the major reasons that many businesses aren’t involved in sustainable practices is due to the lack of specialist green facilities and equipment. Thankfully can recycling isn’t that complicated – everything you need is available online from Every Can Counts, including an extensive range of free promotional materials to help you get everyone enthused and involved.

By introducing a recycling initiative such as Every Can Counts, and promoting the reduce, reuse, recycle message to your colleagues it means that these practices can start to become part of the daily routine of your business, and it could also have a positive impact on your bottom line.

If you would like more information about Every Can Counts or to be involved in the competition and receive a free recycling box please register your interest at ecc@citypress.co.uk

Get recycling and make your cans count this Green Office Week!

by Every Can Counts

*Competition Terms & Conditions

It is a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby a business can monitor and ensure its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards, and international norms. CSR is a process with the aim to embrace responsibility for the company’s actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere who may also be considered as stakeholders.

So, with that in mind, CSR covers an extensive range of business functions. When it comes to recycling however, we can help.

Environmental impact is obviously an important part of the CSR mix and from our point of view it is a small change that can have a huge impact.

Offering drinks can recycling facilities enables those in the workplace to recycle something as simple as a can of coke by installing the right bins and sets in place a recycling agenda. Through this, you, as a company, demonstrate that you have taken the first step to becoming a sustainable business.

From our experience, implementing Every Can Counts in workplaces not only raises the rate of drinks can recycling, but creates a recycling culture by increasing the recycling rates for other materials too. This can obviously have an impact on your bottom line, helping you avoid landfill taxes which have risen this year from £64 per tonne to £72 – bringing your CSR strategy much closer to your ‘business’ strategy.

See how you can make Every Can Count for your CSR strategy here.

Every Can Counts

Now, this got us at Every Can Counts thinking. Why should this be just a student initiative? Whilst many of us would happily return to our student days (a pipedream I’m afraid) it doesn’t mean that we can’t take action against climate change in the workplace.

Whether you run a café, work in education (in which case you’ll be assisting students), catering or facilities management, introducing recycling facilities is an effective and visible way to make a difference and display your company’s green conscience in line with consumers.

With People and Planet aiming to raise awareness around a number of domestic initiatives that will aid the campaign to tackle climate change, one thing that is incredibly simple to do in the workplace is provide drinks can recycling facilities. Recycling one soft drink can saves enough energy to power a boil a kettle 10 times. The drinks can is the most recycled drinks pack!

Corporate social responsibility is at the core of 21^st century business, and leadership in this area is becoming more and more integral to corporate policy. Beyond this, employees and customers are now firmly in the habit of recycling at home and want to be able to continue the habit when they’re at work and on the go. Typically, knowing they are doing the right thing for the environment is good for staff morale, and what’s good for the environment is good for the bottom line!  And if consumers and employees alike haven’t left their green conscience at the wayside during recent years then neither should businesses.

Recycling drink cans can save up to 95% of the energy needed to make aluminium from raw materials but around half the cans used in the UK each year aren’t getting into the recycling system, wasting precious resources and energy. Reducing the waste you send to landfill is another area where you can cut your costs too.

So far this week People and Planet has shown what a can do attitude can achieve. We believe this attitude needs to be replicated across all sectors. It just so happens that installing recycling facilities and setting up a collection service is the perfect first step and these are things which Every Can Counts can help with. To receive your free starter kit for your company, simply register here. If you already have a recycling system in place why not use our free promotional materials to remind staff to recycle more, you can download posters and other materials here.

Every Can Counts

With just 12 months until the new Waste (Scotland) Regulations come into force, it makes good business sense for workplaces north of the border to make a ‘resolution to recycle’ in 2013. The new regulations require all businesses to separate paper and card, plastic, metal and glass for recycling and they come into force on 1^st January 2014, so the clock is ticking.

In Scotland, an estimated 252 million drinks cans are consumed per year outside the home, either ‘on the go’ or by employees in the workplace.  We estimate that an organisation of 50 employees could recycle 3,000 drinks cans per year by making recycling part of their everyday routine.

The launch of Every Can Counts in Scotland is also supported by the Scottish Government’s delivery partner, Zero Waste Scotland, and soft drinks manufacturer A.G. Barr, marking a three-year commitment to drive up recycling rates within the workplace.  The scheme on the whole aims to contribute towards Scotland’s ambitious targets to recycle 70 per cent of all waste by 2025.

The Every Can Counts programme makes it easier than ever to recycle drinks cans at work and can be up and running in five days, providing employees with facilities such as recycling containers, posters and leaflets to recycle.

Since launching in the UK three years ago, the programme has helped businesses save over 75 million drink cans (1,138 tonnes of aluminium and steel) for recycling, avoiding 8,529 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. To find out how much energy could be saved in your workplace from drinks can recycling, try out our Can-culator.

As an added incentive we are offering the first 100 businesses to sign up to the programme in Scotland a free starter pack, advice and resources to introduce and promote recycling facilities to their workplaces.

So, whether to complement an existing recycling facility or to be a stand-alone scheme, get in touch to see how Every Can Counts can help your organisation – before time runs out!

Andrew McFarlan, Programme Manager Scotland, Every Can Counts

In December 2011 we launched Every Can Counts across Barnstaple town centre.  For us at Green Lanes the programme offered a simple solution to a challenge we had been set – to cut down on the amount of waste we sent to landfill.  This was both a corporate commitment and part of the BID Barnstaple civic pride initiative, which aims to encourage both traders and shoppers alike to take pride in their town centre.

We already had an effective waste management system in place for our 38 retail units, and were achieving excellent recycling results across a wide range of materials – in particular for cardboard and plastic.  But we realised that if we were going to keep reducing the amount of waste we were sending to landfill we had to focus on a wider range of waste streams, and encourage our retailers and their staff to get involved too.   Obviously our tenants have their own businesses to run so we knew we had to make it as easy as possible for them to get involved and we wanted to provide everything they needed so that all they had to do was take delivery of their recycling ‘kit’, put the containers out and the rest was taken care of.

Every Can Counts appealed to us because it offers a simple and easy to use system to help their staff recycle whilst they were at work. There’s a good range of promotional materials and the message is clear and easy to understand.   An additional benefit for our town is the relationship we have with Community Resources Devon, a recycling enterprise which helps local adults with learning difficulties.  Their local collection service for recyclable materials meant every business in Barnstaple could begin recycling their drinks cans – and we were the first town in the UK to offer this type of recycling partnership.  So every can recycled is not just helping the planet, it’s also helping local people.

In December 2011 many shops in Green Lanes were provided with can recycling boxes for use in their staff rooms.  Every Can Counts and CRD helped us promote the recycling by running an event in the shopping centre, complete with a ‘Green’ Santa. This ensured we got good local publicity in newspapers and even regional TV news covered the story.

December might seem like a crazy time to launch a new programme – after all our retailers are busy 7 days a week in the run up to Christmas and the New Year – but as everything was so easy to set up our retailers were more than happy to work with us.

From Day One the response to the service has been very positive from the retailers, and CRD have steadily seen the volume of cans they are collecting increasing.  In July we offered CRD and Every Can Counts a vacant shop unit to use to promote their recycling partnership, and the brightly coloured display has encouraged other businesses from the local area to get in touch and join Every Can Counts too.

One year after the launch of our Every Can Counts programme we have collected three quarters of a tonne of cans for recycling and we have cut our waste to landfill by an extra 2% compared to the previous 12 months.  These are meaningful figures that we share with our retail partners and visitors to show how we are doing working towards cutting our waste. It’s important to give feedback so people can appreciate the difference they are making by recycling, it’s our way of saying ‘thank you’ and ‘keep up the good work’.

By Guest Blogger Jan Dayman, Centre Manager, Green Lanes Shopping

So, we launched the creative ExtravaCANza.

And naturally, to help everyone out along the way, we arranged for some cantastic prizes to be sent out for the most creative uses of empty drinks cans!

Entrants for the ExtravaCANza had to upload a design, an image or a video of their canny creation to a special microsite where they then faced the public vote. The top 10 entrants, as voted for by visitors to the microsite, will each receive Love2shop vouchers, with the entrant judged the best by our panel winning a whopping £1,000 of vouchers and a year’s supply of their favourite soft drink.

So, congratulations to David, Edita, Claire, Ade, Jonathan, Gordon, Harsha, Elaine, Reesha and Margi on being voted as one of the winners of our Creative ExtravaCANza. You can find their canny creations here and here.

David, who was judged to be the overall winner by a panel of canny experts, created a fantastic Canned Flower:

The fact of the matter is that each and every drinks can you recycle today can be reprocessed and remade into another can, or used to create an infinite number of metal products. And the process can be repeated over and over again, every time you recycle.  In a whole year one drinks can can be recycled eight times, saving enough energy to make 160 new cans.

We want people to realise that recycling is not only incredibly important but also something that is very easy to incorporate into their everyday routines.

The Creative ExtravaCANza enabled people to think about the life of a can beyond just the consumption of its contents and we were thrilled with everyone’s efforts and support.

Every Can Counts

Although we had set money aside from the Government Olympic Executive to provide a limited number of new on street recycling bins in Weymouth town centre, we’d seen the Every Can Counts Ecopacteur can crushers installed along the coast in Bournemouth and Poole and felt they would really make our new service go off with a bang, so contacted them to see if they could help us.

We found out in December 2011 that our bid for 20 can crushers was successful, and thanks to additional funding from the UK Can Makers that we would be allowed to keep 10 bins after the Games to ensure a lasting legacy for on street recycling in the borough – generosity beyond our wildest dreams! The plan was for the other ten crushers  to be relocated to support recycling on the go projects across the country.

The bins were scattered to all corners of the borough to help maximise the opportunity to recycle, and have been very well received by the public. Over 45 sacks of crushed, uncontaminated cans were collected over the period of the Games, that’s over 35,000 cans!

After tossing many ideas around about how to launch the new can crushers, their arrival was heralded with a press call at Furzy Cliffs on what must have been the only sunny day in June. This made for some glorious shots and attracted local television on the day.

We explored myriad options to gain maximum exposure for the bins and for the brand, though strict branding protection guidelines imposed by LOCOG made this an Olympic task in itself. Advertising was booked on two open top buses operating daily along the sea front, and artwork from a local student was used in the photo shoot and press call to help spread the Every Can Counts message.

We would like to extend our warmest thanks to Every Can Counts for all the support and hard work in bidding for our bins and in helping us to achieve our vision of holding a green Games. I am sure their robust shiny greenness and sophisticated French design will be a welcome sight on the streets of Weymouth and Portland for many years to come – thank you!

If business was akin to fashion, the key trend piece for the 21st century organisation would be sustainability. Across all industries and sectors, CSR strategies have begun to incorporate sustainability for the benefit of both corporate image and the bottom line.

Naturally, much of this is in response to government policy, yet beyond Whitehall they also reflect a growing sense of social responsibility amongst individuals and an increasing belief in the economic benefits of sustainable action within business. 9 in 10 employees now believe that their organisation has sustainability policies in place (2011 Sustainability in FM report).

At Every Can Counts it is the Facilities Managers who we work most closely with – take a look at our case studies – whether it is helping them to develop a drinks can recycling strategy, supporting them with internal communications or even just to provide the equipment needed to maximise recycling in the workplace.

The simple fact of the matter is that companies have hugely important CSR and environmental strategies that need implementing and having a drinks can recycling strategy plays an important part of this. For example, we’ve worked with companies like Unilever to develop drinks can recycling strategies on site.

Aluminium and steel are important resources that can be recycled easily, saving money, time and energy. Take a look at some of our canny facts if you don’t believe us. More and more FMs are investing in recycling strategies and getting closer to sustainable planning because of this – the green agenda is getting bigger in businesses and as a consequence, so are recycling targets.

Recycling is one of the easiest steps to take on the path to a green business future and can have a huge impact when rolled out across multiple sites. Facilities Managers are well aware of this, and that is why they are recycling more and more and working with organisations like Every Can Counts to deliver the best solutions.

Every Can Counts

But of course we were there to promote the recycling of drinks cans, and we did so in a number of ways.  The first was by going out and mingling with the lovely people in the campsites. It was interesting to see that a lot of camps had made some grand creations out of their cans, so when we approached them and told them about the ExtravaCANza competition, it’s fair to say it went down pretty well. Hopefully they’ll be entering to try and win £1,000!

During the festival, we helped man the Every Can Counts football challenge, where people could recycle a can to have four shots at an inflatable goal. If they got in all four in there was a chance to win tickets to next year’s festival, so it was a pretty good deal. We were very impressed by the 7 people who managed to get 4 out of 4 goals; Zac only managed one goal the whole weekend!

There was also a wristband initiative run at the goal and at the campsites’ recycling points for those that went to the extra effort of recycling a whole bag of cans (great for those with terrible football skills). The uniquely numbered wristbands go into a separate draw for tickets to next year’s festival. It complemented a fantastic initiative that Reading Festival was already running – a beer token in exchange for a bag of recyclables.

We also worked inside the arena. To raise brand awareness we threw beach balls into the festival crowds, with the aim to get them shown on the big screen (a fantastic excuse to see some bands and a lot of fun!). If you watch You Me At Six and the Green Day highlights, you may notice some Every Can Counts beach balls flying around!

In addition to all this, Zac made an Iron Man suit out of recycled Coca-Cola cans, it went down extremely well with the crowds, here’s what he has to say about his creation:

“Four or five years ago this wouldn’t have worked, but what with the popularity of the films it was a great way to get peoples’ attention and then communicate the message of recycling in a simple and effective way.  It was amazing being treated like a celebrity whilst knowing I was promoting something I believed in, and I would love to do it again sometime.”

Festival Republic very kindly invited us for a ‘back stage’ tour of their sustainability processes.  They currently split up their waste into recycling, compost and general waste; did you know that all food merchants at Reading have to have compostable packaging? The various recycling streams are separated onsite and there are machines there that crush the sorted materials, like drinks cans, into large cubes.  We got to see the machinery that DSS and Festival Green use to sort the three types of waste for transport and were introduced to the fantastic charity PCF.

The Philippine Community Fund collect ring pulls at the festival, which they then send to the Philippines to be made into jewellery, this gives work to adults and the revenue generated goes towards projects like education and housing.

We had an amazing time at the festival and would like to thank everyone, especially Festival Republic,the Reading Festival organisers, for allowing us to come to the festival and see behind the scenes. They are doing such a fantastic job at encouraging recycling – we’ve certainly seen first-hand what a daunting challenge it can be.  Finally we would like to give a massive shout out to Becca, who unfortunately couldn’t make it, we loved her sticker idea!

Take a look at our Facebook gallery to see how we got on!

]]> http://www.everycancounts.co.uk/blog/student-recycling-champions-guest-blog/feed/ 1 http://www.everycancounts.co.uk/blog/student-recycling-champions-%e2%80%93-guest-blog-post/ http://www.everycancounts.co.uk/blog/student-recycling-champions-%e2%80%93-guest-blog-post/#comments Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:35:24 +0000 Alupro http://www.everycancounts.co.uk/?post_type=blog&p=2996 Continue reading →]]> Ahead of our weekend at Reading Festival we’ve invited our three Student Recycling Champions to tell us a little bit about themselves and what they’re most looking forward to about working with Every Can Counts at Reading Festival.

Zac Hill

I’m delighted to be able to introduce myself as one of the Student Recycling Champions. My name is Zac Hill and I currently study Business Management with Marketing.  I have always respected the importance of recycling and have carried out research at university into the effect the environment has on the reluctance or enthusiasm towards recycling.  I also find the interplay between knowledge and behaviour truly fascinating.

Rather than attempting to modify behaviour, my idea involves encouraging behaviour we already see at festivals.  Quite often I see festival goers piercing their cans onto poles, so I thought this could be encouraged by handing out pipe cleaner-type poles (without the fluff of course) and setting up a Twitter or Facebook competition to find the most creative can sculpture.

These sculptures would then be easy for staff to pick up at the end of the festival and, as every can in the sculpture would be perfectly visible, there wouldn’t be the worry of contamination, which is sometimes faced with recycling bins.  As entrants would need to ‘follow’ or ‘like’ the Every Can Counts social media channels, there would be scope for post-festival communication, to help promote the cause after the festival.

I’m most looking forward to being able to promote recycling in the festival environment. Not only is it a place where most people are in a cheerful, talkative mood, it’s also where thousands of cans are consumed, so it is vital Every Can Counts promotes the responsible disposal of drinks cans.

Zac

John Kilpatrick

Hello, I’m John, an undergraduate studying Management with Marketing at the University of Exeter. I’ve been to Reading Festival for the past two years and what I have always noticed is that without fail, the queue for the artist signing tent is always huge. My idea is simple – offer a fast track-style priority queue jump service for the signing tent, for those who exchange a bin bag full of cans.

I believe that this would provide a very large incentive for people to recycle their cans, as ultimately what is on offer is unique, and cannot be obtained any other way. Music fans always want to meet their favourite artists, but at Reading Festival, they are often put off by the truly grim queue size, knowing that the time spent queuing could be better spent seeing another band. My idea overcomes this problem as it offers people more time to enjoy the festival, whilst at the same time could have a hugely positive effect on the environment.

I’m most looking forward to interacting with festival goers, as the atmosphere at Reading is always great. I’m also looking forward to the promised chance of captaining Every Can Counts’ Twitter account, and tweeting about the various festival shenanigans…. But overall, the whole experience should be great and I’m looking forward to getting started.

John

Becca Smith

Hi everyone!

I’m Becca, I’m 21 and I’m an Environmental Sciences student from sunny Southampton.

I decided to get involved with Every Can Counts because I’m really passionate about the environment, and I believe that young people can really make a difference to the issues affecting our generation. It might sound cheesy, but it’s our future and the good habits we make now will pay off in years to come.

I also believe that recycling doesn’t have to be boring. My idea is to encourage festival goers to win prizes by chasing down the Every Can Counts team and ‘scoring a goal’ by dunking their cans into one of our recycling bins. The team members would be wearing fancy dress and running around to make it more of a challenge. This may have the potential to descend into mud wrestling… but that is the spirit of Reading!

At the festival, I’m most looking forward to meeting people and telling them what we’re all about, so if you see me please don’t hesitate to say hello. I’m also really excited to see Florence and the Machine, Band of Skulls and, of course, the mighty Foo Fighters!

See you there!

Becca x