Recycling and Waste Review identifies value in principle waste streams
 
CHALLENGE
 
Improving environmental performance requires an organisation to challenge itself and there cannot be many organisations more complex than a large acute NHS trust in which to do this. The Trust were looking to both improve their environmental performance and reduce costs and were prepared to allow unrestricted access to achieve this goal.
 
SOLUTION
 
Sitemark were engaged to undertake a recycling and waste benchmarking review across the main site and associated satellite sites. Given the wide range of wastes produced the approach taken was to follow a bottom up audit trail from bin to boardroom. This involved observations of disposal operations and waste movements, inspection of internal and external waste containers and auditing of invoicing through to performance reporting.
 
RESULT
 
The benchmarking review identified that percentages of material being sent to non-recycling end of life solutions could be diverted to recycling solutions without too many changes to internal portering processes. The benchmarking review process also confirmed that there were opportunities to turn some streams into an asset of the Trust. Savings and rebates were identified over and above the cost of the process and these can now be invested back into other sustainability led projects.
 
"Through our engagement with Sitemark we have had an independent review of our recycling processes and we now fully understand where we have strong best practice processes and solutions in place. We have also been able to start looking at areas where we can improve our recycling performance and consider cost reduction programmes”
 
Jeanette Baker - Senior Facilities Manager
 
ABOUT North Bristol NHS
 
North Bristol NHS Trust is one of the largest hospital trusts in the UK and operates an acute hospital at Southmead and six ancillary sites across Bristol providing specialist healthcare services.
 
For further information please contact us on:
T: 01684 580680
E: efficiency@sitemark.co.uk
W: www.sitemark.co.uk