Abbeycroft Leisure checks out Havebury Housing recycling

Abbeycroft Leisure and Havebury Housing are both supporting the BBC Radio Suffolk Rubbish Diet.  Cat Rayson from Abbeycroft Leisure writes about her team's visit to check out the super-organised recycling system at the housing association's main office.

On Friday our intrepid Abbeycroft Leisure recyclers headed to Havebury Housing to meet Michael Blackford - their green man whose expertise we planned to utilize to our benefit for our own Slim Your Bin challenge.

Michael met us in reception where we got our first view of their recycling efforts:

 

Very snazzy. We have similar bins at Bury St Edmunds Leisure centre but with the volume of visitors we get and the amount of small children, they’re not always used in the correct manner. Quite often you’ll encounter a banana peel in the cans and plastic side of the bin – which is never a treat.

This problem is one of many that face a business when trying to encourage recycling: education. How do we educate people to use the bins correctly? Michael’s answer is that people learn in time and get used to the process... although we didn’t see many children running around Havebury on a high from their swim session. I guess we have different challenges in that department.

Sweeping into the ground floor office, the first thing that struck us was the size of the open plan environment (and the cake table we passed on our way to the bins!). Our offices at the Leisure centre are so much smaller in comparison – surely if Havebury can implement a recycling system on this scale, it’ll be easy for us?

Each cluster of desks have their own bin station. Some employees are within throwing distance so I’m sure some competitive games of bin basketball take place daily. Others have to walk from their desks to the bins, it looks like exercise is being encouraged concurrently with recycling! The bins are pretty fancy and have handy ‘toppers’ what indicate their use: blue for recycling and black for general waste. This is a delightful coincidence as our council bin collection separates as such so there’s no need to associate further colours with this work-based environmental outlook.

We moved upstairs to IT (and pass another cake table – two cake tables!! I wonder if they have any vacancies…?) and talk to the team about recycling further office supplies. We notice they have a big open box full of printer cartridges. We get through toner like its ice cream at Abbeycroft Leisure and at present, we don’t have a recycling system in place for our old toner cartridges.

Havebury Housing have a super handy box supplied by ‘Each One Counts’ http://www.eachonecounts.co.uk/ a company who provide you with a recycling box to fill up. You fill the box, you email them and they collect the box and donate money to charity. So not only is your conscience clear from recycling, you get the added bonus of giving money to charity – all for something that would have previously have gone to landfill!

With our visit drawing to a close, Michael made some last suggestions in regards to how we can be more environmentally conscious in regards to our attitudes to recycling in our offices.

• Change printer paper to recycled paper – it doesn’t have to be a complete swap, you can phase it in gradually.
• Create bin stations in the office with clear differences between the bins and what they hold.
• Look at having confidential waste collected for shredding/recycling.

We’ve since ordered our own recycling boxes for Bury St Edmunds and Haverhill Leisure Centres for our used toner cartridges and we’re on the case of ordering our new bins and looking at more eco-friendly supplies. Next stop – a visit to the Masons Materials Recycling Facility in Great Blakenham to see what happens to our cardboard and plastic when we put it in the blue bin. Hard hats ahoy!