Case Study - pitt&sherry

Download the Case Study - pitt&sherry (PDF).

The project

Implementation of best-practice guidelines for waste management in shared tenancies, including:

• Recruitment of champions to collaborate and implement best practices.
• Targeted communication and engagement of stakeholders.
• Risk assessment and stakeholder consultation in establishing risk controls.

Background

• The company has a strong focus on sustainability and is a tenant in a five-star energy efficient building. However, the property does not provide recycling services.

Objectives

• Reduce waste to landfill and demonstrate leadership in sustainable practices at Cimitiere House.

Targets

• Reduce pitt&sherry’s waste to landfill by 50%.
• Achieve and maintain acceptable contamination levels.

Outcomes

What was implemented?

• Conducted an awareness campaign to recruit waste ‘champions’ in other tenancies.
• Presented a business case for introducing cardboard recycling for the building to the building manager, with a strategy for reducing contamination.
• Negotiated a group purchasing arrangement with a waste management provider for each tenant to manage their own co-mingled recycling.
• Re-introduced recycling of office paper in the Launceston pitt&sherry office.

Key issues

• Location of skips makes it difficult to control contamination, and collection can only occur during work hours.
• Getting the property manager on-board.

Performance against targets

• We are now diverting an average of 1,400 litres of waste from landfill each month.
• We eliminated problems with contamination by putting responsibility back onto each tenant to manage their co-mingled recycling.

Lessons learnt

• The different types of waste streams and how they are managed.
• The range of wastes that can be redirected.
• The significant variations in services and prices offered by different waste management providers.
• Cardboard is a commodity, there is a cost incentive to keep it out of landfill.
• I learnt about the action learning process and how it was applied in the BREP program.