2 October 2015 Tool

Your Workplace Without Waste

Getting employees engaged in a company’s quest to improve resource efficiency has proved to be a surefire winner. With many companies having run successful campaigns relating to energy and water, WRAP has produced the ‘Your Workplace Without Waste’ programme to help you tackle food and packaging waste in your business.

Benefits include:

  • Increase employee awareness and understanding of waste as an issue
  • Help employees gain skills to recognise, measure and cost the impact of food and packaging waste
  • Encourage employees to generate and implement solutions to the waste hotspots identified
  • Lead to significant waste and cost reductions as well as reducing the environmental impact of your operations.

Access the ‘Your Workplace Without Waste’ materials

Your Workplace Without Waste has been developed so you can choose the combination of materials that will work for you.  Either run through the whole toolkit as a standalone training programme, or pick and mix the combination of activities to fit into an existing sustainability or staff training programme.
 
If you would like to use Your Workplace Without Waste content within your own sustainability programme and corporate livery, please contact [email protected] for the design source files for complete tailorability.

If you’re ready to engage your employees in waste reduction, download the materials below.

Kick-start a Campaign

A handy guide to running a waste reduction campaign with ideas for activities and information about how to make the best use of communications to get resource efficiency messages across, plus customisable templates to raise awareness and support the delivery of an eye-catching campaign.

Guide for Managers

A short, self-study guide that introduces waste reduction and the commercial, legal and environmental case for action with sign-posting to the guidance and tools available to enable businesses to reduce food, drink and packaging waste.

Guidance for Trainers

Step-by-step notes to help you to understand the programme and train a team of ‘champions’, who then pass on the learning to other members of staff. Also includes general guidance on working with groups.
a. Train the Trainer session notes
b. Train the Trainer PowerPoint
c. Trainers Guide - Working with groups

Five interactive activities, based on key aspects of reducing waste in the workplace, to engage staff in positive behaviour change and equipping them with the skills to take action whilst at work. Includes full session notes.

Activity 1 – What a Waste

  • A fun way to start and find out more about food, drink and packaging waste
  • Raises awareness of wasting money and contribution to CO2 emissions
  • Considers causes of waste
  • Quiz can be adapted to include questions based on waste data from the business

Activity 2 – Where’s the Waste?

  • Identifies where waste tends to occur – at both sector and business level
  • Locates the real waste ‘hot-spots’ on a plan, schematic or process flow diagram
  • Introduces the concept of the ‘true cost of waste’
  • Customisable scenario stimulates discussion of opportunities to reduce waste

Activity 3 – Waste ‘Treasure’ Hunt

  • Encourages the ‘eyes and ears’ of the business to take ownership of reducing waste
  • Involves getting out onto the floor to seek out waste in familiar and unfamiliar areas
  • Focuses on recording the location, reason/root cause and amount of waste observed
  • Group/peer discussion encourages solutions for reducing wastes identified

Activity 4 – Getting the Measure of our Waste

  • Demonstrates the steps from visually auditing to measuring waste
  • Staff work together to estimate the quantities of different waste types identified during
    walkabout
  • Helps quantify the best quantities of waste for action
  • Option to provide a ‘true cost of waste’ example
     

Activity 5 – What we can do about Waste

  • Final session concludes staff training on waste reduction
  • Focuses on prioritising areas for action based on effort vs. impact
  • Pairs/small groups agree key areas for action
  • Outputs form action plan to target high-waste areas and potentially significant cost savings

Maintaining Momentum
Information – and inspiration – to sustain waste reduction activity with messages to incorporate into regular communications with staff, whether you’ve got one minute, a coffee break or a team meeting

Itching to Pitch
Use our ‘Itching to Pitch?’ ideas competition  to encourage great ideas from staff for cutting waste in the workplace.
Employees are often the best people to identify opportunities to reduce waste and yet, often, they either do not believe it is their place to make suggestions or do not know how.

a. Entry form
b. Judging form
c. Poster ideas – coming soon

End of session feedback form
Use this to get feedback from your staff and ideas for how to improve things. WRAP would love to hear any feedback you have.

Need more information?
See our Frequently Asked Questions or contact [email protected]  to talk things through.

Download files

  • WRAP-1. YWWW How it works.pdf

    PDF, 324.37 KB

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