Reduce your waste

For many businesses, pollution and waste are among the most important
environmental impacts - and ones that can be relatively easy to control.
Reducing pollution and waste helps you cut costs and improve your
reputation, leading to significant increases in profitability.
You must comply with your legal obligations to control pollution and waste,
but you should do more - reducing them as much as you can. Where
possible, you should try to avoid producing waste or pollution in the first
place. If you can’t do this, you’ll want to look for better ways of dealing with
them, such as recycling waste or treating trade effluent.

Your approach to pollution and waste
Work with your employees,
suppliers and waste-disposal contractors
Eliminate unnecessary waste
Manage unavoidable waste

Get organised
 Decide who will be responsible for managing your
business' pollution and waste.
 Include pollution and waste management in your
overall environmental management strategy.
 Taking a systematic approach improves the
effectiveness of your environmental management. It
can also help you attract customers who require their
suppliers to meet a recognised standard.

Identify all the potential sources of pollution in your business
Review which processes use or produce environmentally harmful substances,
including trade effluent.
Assess what pollution you produce
• Check for obvious signs, such as visible emissions, smells or noise coming
from your premises.
• Check that you are using effective storage. Check that storage of harmful
substances such as oils and pesticides meets specific regulatory
requirements.
• Review storage areas for any signs of leaks, overflows or poor maintenance
and working practices.
• Check that waste is stored and handled securely. If necessary, take advice on
handling hazardous wastes.
Schedule the next review
 Regular reviews allow you to monitor the
effectiveness of the steps you have
taken and identify new weaknesses to
address.
 You may need separate reviews if you
start using new equipment, materials or
ways of working, or get involved in new
activities.

Review your legal obligations
 You have a legal duty of care to ensure that any waste you produce
is properly stored and disposed of. This includes all commercial,
industrial and household wastes (including hazardous).
 You must comply with clean air legislation and other restrictions on
harmful emissions and water contamination. You are also responsible
for cleaning up any land and water contamination that you cause.
 If you use packaging or sell products that are packaged, you must
minimise the amount of packaging, ensure it can be reused or
recycled and avoid high levels of heavy metals in it.
 If you have a turnover of more than £2 million and handle more than
50 tonnes of packaging a year, you must register with your
environmental regulator or an approved compliance scheme and
recycle and recover specific amounts of the waste.

 If you produce, sell or use waste electrical and electronic equipment
(WEEE) such as household appliances, tools, or heating, cooling and
lighting equipment, you must follow WEEE rules on disposing of it and
keep proof that you have given it to an authorised waste-management
company.
 Noise and smells can also be seen as pollution if they cause a
nuisance.
 You may face legal action if your emissions or waste cause a nuisance
to your neighbours.
Review your legal obligations

Make sure you have the right environmental permits
 These have replaced the various types of written authorisation such
as licences and consents.
 You need a permit if you transport or carry out waste activities for
other people, such as storing, treating or disposing of it. You also
need a permit if you produce hazardous waste or keep or dispose of
radioactive substances.
 Special rules also apply to waste batteries, animal by-products, food
waste, old vehicles and hazardous waste.
 You need a permit to get rid of anything other than clean water into
surface waters (e.g. a pond) or groundwater, or to get rid of liquid
waste into sewers.
 You need a permit if you use a lot of local water from surface waters
or groundwater.

Assess the benefits you can expect
 Reducing pollution and waste can help you
reduce costs, build your reputation with
customers, motivate employees and attract
investment.
 An effective waste-reduction initiative reduces
costs for a typical business by around 1% of
turnover. Marketing opportunities and other
benefits from improved performance could be
much higher.
 Understanding the potential benefits helps
you decide how much time and money to
invest in waste and pollution reduction and
where to focus your efforts.

Look around your premises for signs of waste
 Assess what is going into each bin, skip and drain. Waste
typically includes raw materials, packaging and extras such
as cleaning products, lubricants (such as oils) and
consumables.
 Check for indications of energy going to waste: for example,
open doors, or steam coming from a production process.
Check temperatures in both heated and cooled areas.
Review the waste you produce
 As well as obvious waste such as leaks, identify all the
activities that use water. There may well be opportunities to
reduce levels of water usage and effluent production.
 Check at different times of the day and at weekends. For
example, are you lighting or heating vacant premises
overnight?

Work with your employees, suppliers and
waste-disposal contractors
 Ask employees to identify unnecessary waste and for
suggestions how to make reductions. Training and
motivating employees to play their part in reducing
waste and pollution will be a key part of any solution.
 Ask suppliers to keep you up to date with new
materials and technologies that will let you reduce
waste, switch to less hazardous substances, cut
emissions or use less energy.
 Talk to your waste-disposal contractors about the
services they provide and how you can cut
waste-disposal volumes and treatment costs

Identify key opportunities to make
improvements
 Use your records and utility bills to estimate the inputs (such
as raw materials, water and energy), outputs and waste for
each main activity. You may need help from your advisers to
assess complex industrial processes.
 Use records of products damaged in storage or rejected by
customers to help you assess the waste caused by errors.
 Use cost records, including costs of waste disposal, to identify
the activities with the highest waste costs.
 Ask your advisers for benchmark information to help you
compare your waste performance with best practice in your
sector. Tracking changing waste levels over time can also
help you identify problem areas.

Minimise office waste and travel
 Use email instead of paper communications when
possible. Post information on a company intranet
instead of circulating copies.
 Ensure emails and other documents are not
printed out unnecessarily.
 Use double-sided printing and photocopying. Use
power-management software to automatically turn
computers off when they are not in use.
 Invest in more efficient technologies - such as
server consolidation and virtualisation - to reduce
IT hardware requirements and energy use.
 Consider introducing homeworking - reducing
your office space, furniture requirements and
journeys to and from work.
 Consider running a green travel plan for staff and
reducing unnecessary commuting.
3. Eliminate unnecessary waste

Minimise packaging
 Eliminate unnecessary packaging, and design
packaging to minimise wastage (such as offcuts).
 Work with customers to use or create reusable
transport packaging, rather than packaging that they
recycle or discard.
Avoid stock and product waste
 Store raw materials, stock and finished goods safely,
to eliminate breakages and spills.
 Rotate stock (first in, first out) to avoid stock
deteriorating.

Reduce energy use
 Use natural light and ventilation when possible.
 Turn down heating thermostats. Use timers and automated
controls to avoid unnecessary heating, lighting and power use.
 Ensure that premises are effectively insulated. Avoid heat loss
through open doors and windows.
 Consider providing localised heating (eg of water) rather than
having long, wasteful piperuns from a central boiler.

4. Manage unavoidable waste
Stream different types of waste
 Keep different kinds of waste separate to make it easier to treat each
type of waste in the most effective way. For example, provide separate
bins for waste paper.
 Reuse or return packaging used to deliver supplies to you.
 Refill toner and ink cartridges rather than discarding them, reuse scrap
paper for notes.
 See whether you can reuse returned goods, or at least some of the
components.
 Consider refurbishing and selling old equipment, or dismantling it for
parts, rather than discarding it.
 Local businesses may be able to use your waste as a raw material.
Regional waste exchanges can help you find potential partners.
 Old equipment and furnishings can be donated to local charities.

November 2019
ACCA LEGAL NOTICE
This is a basic guide prepared by ACCA UK's Technical Advisory Service for members and their clients. It should not be used
as a definitive guide, since individual circumstances may vary. Specific advice should be obtained, where necessary.
Arrange advice and help
WRAP offers guidance on improving resource efficiency and reducing waste throughout your business.
The Carbon Trust offers advice and services to help you reduce your carbon footprint and wasted energy.

Reduce your waste

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