Liz Allen is the Enviromental Consultant at Hosking Associates . Read more of her Article here Fresh Business Thinking.com and FM Forum
We have become used to the idea of recycling, but is this enough?
We do it at home, and more businesses are recognising the financial benefits of waste
segregation and recycling in the workplace.
What ‘matchmaking’ could you do for your business waste? Could your unwanted waste material be just what someone else needs?
Each time a material is recycled, its quality is generally reduced leading to a higher demand for virgin raw material. According to Friends of the Earth, humans today extract and use around 50% more natural resources than 30 years ago – that’s about 60 billion tonnes a year. If we continue in the same way, the amount could be 100 billion tonnes of raw material by 2030. It’s not just the environmental problems associated with resource extraction, there are often social problems such as human rights violations and poor working conditions linked with these industries which we should be taking into account
