Case Study - pitt&sherry
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.
Download the Case Study - pitt&sherry (PDF 1.5 MB).
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.