Control Your Waste: You Can’t Manage What You Aren’t Measuring

Do you have a recycling program at your company? There’s a lot of public interest these days in organizations that operate sustainably — which (along with potential cost savings!) has led many companies to look more seriously at recycling as a part of their waste management system.

But once you’ve decided to put more of a focus on sustainable waste management, the question becomes: how do you know how well you’re doing it? It can be hard to quantify when you could look at overflowing bins one day and empty bins the next.

The Right (Accurate) Measurement is Key

If you want to monitor the success of a recycling program, one of the most common metrics in use is your waste diversion rate, expressed as a percentage.

Simply put, that’s the percentage of your total waste (by weight) that’s recycling. You can calculate it by dividing your recycling weight by your total waste weight and multiplying by 100.

So, if you produce 200 kg total waste per week, and 50 kg of that is recycling, you have a waste diversion rate of 25%.

Depending on your situation, you may want to go a bit deeper, and ask what your kg of waste rate might be per square foot, per occupant, per hotel guest, and so on.

Asking these questions might prompt solutions that increase your diversion rate by tackling waste production in more targeted ways.

So How Do You Measure Your Waste?

All this is great — but you won’t be able to follow through on any of these sustainability initiatives if you can’t actually get the data. Your haulers don't always consistently measure the weight or volume of your waste, many haulers just collect it and take it away. And you can’t just tell visually based on how full your bins “look”, because you’ll get errors from inconsistency in measuring

What you actually need are sensors in your bins. That might sound pretty high tech for waste — but it’s a proven technology that gives you more power to grow your sustainability program by delivering accurate, reliable data every day.

RecycleSmart’s Waste Sensor Program

Want these sensors? It’s what we do.

Our waste sensors let you know how full your bins are getting in real time. Not only does this mean that you can set up a more effective and cost-friendly schedule with your hauler, but it also means you get access to all that data.

And it’s only with all that data that you can measure whether further waste reduction strategies are working. Want to get set up? Get in contact!