Aloha,
Question 1:
We are required to sort & weigh ALL building waste in our audit, but what about small tenant-managed recycling programs? For example, my project building's janitorial staff collects all tenant waste and paper/cardboard recycling. However during my walkthrough I noticed that some tenants have various individual recycling programs for recyclables such as blue prints, confidential shredded paper, and glass/plastic beverage containers. The building managers and janitorial staff are not responsible for managing these tenant-driven recycling programs. Do we need to include these recyclables in our audit?
Question 2:
For our waste audit, we are isolating a 24-hours of waste collection to weigh and sort. However, much of the recyclables are collected every few weeks. Do we have to isolate 1-day's worth of recycling also? What if we are working to get figures from private with shredded paper companies and they only know the amount of shredded paper on a weekly basis?
Thanks for your help!
Barry Giles
Founder & CEO, LEED Fellow, BREEAM FellowBuildingWise LLC
LEEDuser Expert
338 thumbs up
May 24, 2012 - 2:34 pm
Sounds like you have some great tenants:
Q1. Yes...every thing must be included. If the tenants are sorting their own recycles then they must be able to track what they do with them, Shredded paper usually goes thru a third party contractor, start getting the receipts from your tenants. Where are your tenants dropping the recycles...are they selling the aluminium for example...then get the receipts.
Q2. The purpose of the audit is two fold, the first is to gain the % of each type of recycle in each of the current recycle streams and to see how 'clean' each stream is and then to find the % of the total which is trash.
The second is to create a report showing what the % of trash COULD have been recycled and set up processes to make this happen. Example. Your audit shows that the recycle bins from the tenants contain only 10% of the aluminimum cans from the total stream...as you've found that the trash contains another load of cans which didn't get into the recycle. Your job is then to educate, create new process or 'wave the magic wand' to increase the aluminimum recycle rate to the highest % you can get...hopefully 100%. The trash audit also shows up what items are in the stream that can never be recycled...lets just say for this example that's polystrene. Well you could say that we can't recycle that so it has to stay in the waste stream...but what about going to the tenant who's producing that item and dropping it in the trash...is there a methodology can can be implemented that could encourage the tenant NOT to use that polystrene and then it wouldn't end up in the trash.
My guys LOVE this dumpster dive...