The Power of Less Waste: How Efficient Recycling Helps Your Business

A modern manufacturing business should be a well-organised hive of activity. From inputting materials to the finished product, every process can be carried out efficiently – or inefficiently. But inefficiency costs money and time, so every successful business will aim to consume the minimum amount of material they need, designing waste out before it has the chance to become waste.

In a traditional linear supply chain, it’s easy to be inefficient: materials are shipped in, processed, and moved out – but often without any real end-to-end transparency on how much material gets lost in the mix. Linear supply models are riddled with material leakage points, and often simply do not lend themselves to reducing or recycling the waste that a business produces.

Less is more: Moving to a circular approach

But with recycling targets rising, and businesses understanding the cost of waste on the bottom line, it’s time to move to a more circular approach. By adopting a circular alternative to traditional supply chains, we can start to understand the whole-of-life cost implications of decisions made and actions taken. As part of this, DS Smith is committed to The Power of Less: less waste and more efficiency.

The benefits of reducing waste in the workplace

Moving to a circular model shifts the focus. If you consider resources as being part of a supply cycle, rather than a chain, you consider the implications of the waste you’re generating – how can you get more from your resources, while producing less waste? This doesn’t just apply to materials, either: energy usage, logistics and transportation can all be improved by considering them as part of a life cycle, not simply links in a chain.

Less waste in your supply cycle means more time and money spent on your business. That’s the Power of Less.

Ways to reduce bussiness waste

Look at the stages of your supply chain: how can you start considering it as a supply cycle? Are you wasting resources without realising it? Often, generating less waste begins with a change of perspective.

The best way to reduce waste is to think about it before it’s generated, because you might be able to prevent it from happening at all. Designers, manufacturers, retailers, consumers: we can all think about how to produce less and use less, which will save on manufacturing costs as well as reducing waste.

At DS Smith, everything we do is focused on helping our customer sell more, reduce costs and mitigate risk. Packaging has a vital role to play to get products from manufacturer to consumer in pristine condition – but it must also perform so many other functions: be easy to recycle, be easy to read in a shop, and more. Packaging needs to perform for so many stakeholder groups; manufacturer, retailer, logistics, consumer, and not forgetting our environment – but good packaging will serve all of these needs, and ultimately should help to reduce waste rather than contribute to waste generation.

Design for recycling

Product designers can design out waste before a product has even been made. Junk mail is a good example of bad design. Most people put marketing mail, or junk mail, in the paper collection bin – but often its designers have not considered what happens to it post-consumer interaction. For example, poly-coated paper flyers are a problem within paper recycling processes – because, in simple terms, you can’t make plastic out of paper and you can’t make paper out of plastic.

So why not make marketing mail out of paper that belongs in a paper recycling bin? Then it can go back into the supply cycle as a raw material, to be recycled into other paper products.

Understanding consumer behaviour – which bin they put the mail in, and the process that then follows – will make a difference to the way your products are used, reused, and how the resources in them can continue contributing value to the supply cycle.

High quality, higher value

As with all manufacturing processes, recycling demands high quality raw materials. If paper presented for recycling is highly contaminated, then this can present a problem that can mean material meant for recycling being fit only for energy recovery or landfill. We can’t make a durable cardboard box from paper that’s covered in food. For us, anything that isn’t clean paper or cardboard has ‘contaminants’. Contaminants mean that material that could have been recycled, can’t be – and that means it’s waste.

It’s cheaper and more energy efficient to buy recycled materials, but only if they’re every bit as good as a product made from new. We can all understand that – nobody wants to buy a recycled product to find that it isn’t up to scratch. So the paper and cardboard that is our raw material needs to be of a high enough quality for the products it is making.

It surprises people to learn that they can make a difference to recycling rates just by storing different materials separately before they are collected, but it can significantly limit the contamination that compromises material quality. It’s not so surprising when you think about it: if a mill receives a delivery of cardboard that’s contaminated with glass or metal, the contaminants will damage machinery that’s been designed to handle paper-based products. Contaminants can even cause recycling processes to stop altogether while we remove the problem.

So when we say ‘The Power of Less Waste’, we mean that if you separate your recycling, you’ll generate less waste, because we can recycle more of it. 

That’s why, when we start working with a new organisation, we scrutinise everything: from our new partner’s environmental goals, segregation capabilities, and waste generation activities, to their recycling rates, logistical infrastructures, and waste spend – all variables that can be managed to help business achieve not only compliance, but also best achievable practice.

We aim to drive change in processes and behaviour so that everyone, from those making decisions to team members using the recycling bins, can benefit from the Power of Less Waste.

 

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