Make a Green Change
Making a green change means re-evaluating your approach to resources and making holistic changes to your operations. Making a green change is like any other workplace change – it requires motivation, good communication and consultation, monitoring and review of effectiveness, and recognition and reward for achievement.
Some starters
- Form a green committee of staff at different levels, and in different functions. The committee can find ways of introducing green ideas into the workplace
- Include waste management in staff job descriptions and discuss waste and environmental issues as a permanent item on meeting agendas
- For long-term change, adopt a green philosophy or environmental policy linked to your organisation's vision, goals and strategies
The Queensland Government has developed a 
Waste Management Toolkit (1.7MB) for business and industry to help business help themselves in making a green change.
The North East Waste Forum has also developed a Do It Yourself Toolkit providing a comprehensive guide to making your business waste wise.
Eight steps towards making a green change
Step 1 – Organise support
Step 2 - Carry out a waste audit
Step 3 – Analyse work procedures
Step 4 – Identify opportunities
Step 5 – Examine opportunities
Step 6 – Create a waste management plan
Step 7 – Implement the waste management plan
Step 8 – Measure results
Step 1 – Organise support
If you want to be a green champion, follow some easy tips to get management interested and staff on-side. Forming a 'green team' in your organisation is a great idea, with weekly or monthly meetings to keep initiatives progressing.
If you run into resistance, it can help to have some killer comebacks (880kb) to motivate others.
A staff survey is a great place to start to understand people's attitudes to waste and their habits, and to get their ideas for improvement. When people feel they've been consulted, they're more likely to get involved.
The next steps can be taken with the help of management, a staff environmental committee or an individual green champion working with management approval.
Step 2 – Carry out a waste audit
This involves examining waste. It can range from a desk audit, to seeing what you purchase and how much goes out as waste, or a waste assessment where you examine the contents of your bins.
Audit step 1: record your purchases
Review your current buying practices and costs and your waste disposal costs and practices (so you can count the savings later). See how and where waste is generated.
Audit step 2: record your waste management costs
Now that you know what your company is bringing in as consumables, account for what is going out as waste including details of waste management contractors, volumes and costs.
Audit step 3: carry out a waste audit
A formal waste audit is a structured process to find out how much, and what sort of, waste is being generated. It is possible to do an audit yourself, being mindful of workplace health and safety issues (waste is never handled with bare hands). Alternatively, consultants can be brought in to plan, supervise and audit. Don't tell staff the date for the audit so staff won't change their habits in advance.
Before undertaking a formal audit, you can start with a self assessment questionnaire to evaluate what your business is doing and to find out how it can improve.
Remember occupational health and safety when you start rummaging through bins. Record your waste stream during your audit, using template forms for general waste and recyclables.
Audit step 4 –summarise your results
Once you've done your waste audit, results can be summarised to act as a benchmark for future assessments. This allows you to review progress and measure success.
Step 3 – Analyse work procedures
This involves looking at how resources enter and pass through your business and how they leave as waste. Look at procedures for receiving, storing and using materials and how waste is produced, stored, handled and removed.
This step will help identify points at which changes can be made to minimise waste, improve office efficiency and reduce costs.
A site analysis to examine where bins could be placed and how to make your work environment more conducive to waste reduction is another good idea. Simply placing bins in better positions can produce great results.
Step 4 – Identify waste management opportunities
Armed with data on resources purchased, the waste your business generates and the waste flow through your business, you can identify ways to rethink, reduce, reuse and recycle.
Start with buying green. You can examine our tips for initial ideas that may work in your business (simple office paper reduction tips work in most offices).
For each opportunity, identify associated costs and savings as well as special requirements (e.g. equipment and signage).
Step 5 – Assess opportunities
Some changes are quick, easy and cheap whilst others take more effort and expense.
Determine the time frame, cost, benefits and practicality of each opportunity identified and prioritise them based on:
- environmental benefit
- net cost
- timeframe
- practicality
High priority options then become the basis for an action plan, remembering that it can be worthwhile implementing some 'quick wins' to build momentum. Also consider that more expensive options can be offset by cost savings achieved through other initiatives.
Step 6 – Draw up a waste management action plan
To develop your plan:
- set out goals or targets for each part of the action plan (developed in Step 5)
- identify steps you need to take
- work out a timeframe for achievement
- allocate jobs and tasks to staff
- develop a budget for the action plan
Action plan template
The North East Waste Forum has developed a guide (351kb) or use the template Waste Reduction Action Plan produced by Sustainability Victoria as a starting point for your own action plan.
Step 7 – Implement the waste management plan
Once management has endorsed the plan, progress needs to be monitored and regular reports made to management and staff.
Good communication is the key to success and a range of practical tools, like posters and signage, can remind people to do the right thing. Environmental messages on office computer screens are another way to provide a daily reminder when staff log on each day.
Monitoring your progress will not only show when things aren't working as planned, but will also produce results to support continued waste reduction and keep people motivated.
Rewards and recognition can be linked to good results to keep the waste reduction momentum going. Consider competitions encouraging staff to find new ideas and put some of the cost savings from waste reduction efforts into staff or charitable initiatives.
Use tools in the Waste Reduction Toolkit to help implement the plan.
Step 8 – Measure results
Keep staff motivated by letting them know what they are achieving through their efforts and use the results to act as a benchmark for future assessments. This allows you to review progress and measure success. Develop a progress report template to track your results.
You can calculate the savings in dollars and reduced landfill and energy consumption by using the following 
resource (1.38MB) developed by Sustainability Victoria.
Some other options:
Sustainability Victoria has a quick 10-tip approach (92 kb) for small businesses to become 'Resource Smart'. It includes an easy-to-follow action plan.
Use this wastewise calculator (1.3MB) to find out how your wastewise efforts will reduce landfill and energy consumption.
General waste audit tools
The NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change & Water have developed a great guide on how to undertake a waste audit.
These waste assessment guidelines (190kb) were developed as part of Sustainability Victoria's Waste Wise certification program.
You can use this template (also developed by Waste WIse) to record your waste during an audit.
Want to know more?
Council has prepared a variety of fact sheets on waste reduction and recycling.
Next page: Waste Reduction Toolkit - - Updated on: Tuesday 08-Jun-10
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