Realising the value of waste

CHOOSING THE right facilities management company to support your business, can be extremely complicated, as there are so many factors to take into account. The number and size of locations, as well as the number of people employed at, or visiting, each facility will impact on the range of services required, and assessing this correctly can only be achieved through a thorough due diligence process.

If an FM services provider appears to have off-the-shelf solutions and pricing, then they haven’t taken a proper look at your business and its current and future FM needs. 

During the due diligence process of working with each new client, FFM seeks to unlock and deliver financial savings, across all functions from cleaning and grounds maintenance, to catering and energy management.

One particular area where we almost always discover an opportunity to save money and add value, is around recycling and waste management. Due diligence usually reveals that a company’s recycling processes at each site are inadequate and that they are missing out on the opportunity to recover significant rebates.

Unlocking the value of waste

We help our clients to reverse their behaviour and spending. Before we become involved, they are often paying companies to take waste away from their premises and facilities. Clients do not always have the time to expect their own staff to separate waste, so our on-site staff separate waste, so that it can be collected by the correct recyclers.

As a result, our clients make money from their waste - sufficient to more than cover the cost of the process. Each month, for each waste stream according to tonnage, we receive a rebate from the recycler, which we pass on to our client.

In manufacturing facilities, we examine specific recycling opportunities for particular waste streams and ensure that separation and collection are optimized. 

Improving sustainability is the ultimate aim, but adopting processes and procedures to ensure correct separation and collection has allowed our clients to understand and embrace the fact that waste has value. 

Rebates can be achieved across all types of waste, from cardboard, through most plastics, to aluminium and steel, realizing a previously untapped, viable revenue stream.

We always look at the bigger picture and at every aspect of a business, doing all we can to help our clients improve their sustainability credentials and reduce their carbon footprint. It is important to reduce or remove plastics on-site, so as an example, where we provide vending or catering services, we’ve swapped out the cups to recyclable ones from VegWare.

Education is key to efficient waste management

In every business, education is key to efficient waste management. For many of our manufacturing clients, the separation of materials for recycling in the factory is quite obvious, but when you get down to behaviour in common and rest areas, we still witness the tendency for people to see a bin and just throw waste into it, without considering what needs to happen next.

FFM supports its clients by providing the correct range of bins, appropriate signage and education. Our staff actively engage with our client’s employees to encourage best practice, and we put up posters which emphasize the importance of correctly separating waste and explain that by so doing, it has a value, bringing income, rather than incurring cost. In this way we can help to influence a change in the culture throughout a business, so that everyone plays their part in ensuring that waste is properly recycled and achieves its full value.

Utilising Smart FM

We have noticed that for most businesses, shareholders are asking for sustainability and environmental issues to move to the top of the agenda. Our role is to actively help our clients to deliver on that important goal and to provide measurable improvements and results.

Many sites have managers dedicated specifically to waste management and the efficient recycling of waste, so working closely with them as a facilities management company and providing the correct reporting at the right time is crucial. 

FFM's Smart Tech Platform drives productivity and enables integration of data and business systems into scalable specific solutions - with smart workflows and automation driving integrated business services. The fully integrated Mobile Solution provides our staff with instant real-time access to important information to help them complete tasks, while our specially designed portal gives customers 24/7 access to their business profile. Our technology stack solution suite brings all this together in a single portal, enabling optimal service delivery through smart workflow and task automation. 

The platform enables real-time live reporting about the types and amounts of recycling, allowing us to discover what we can do better, and we go through the data once a month with our stakeholders to identify areas for improvement, ranging from staff education to space allocation. We also focus on the financial impact to ensure our clients benefit from the value of their waste.

FFM partners with an energy management company which can fit devices in any location to monitor usage. This can include major waste equipment such as bailers and crushers, which consume a great deal of energy. Monitoring enables us to see how much energy they are using, when, and why.

For instance, using a bailer half full, three times a day, as opposed to once a day at a certain time when it’s cheaper to run. We also offer solar panels that feed energy back into a site, so it almost becomes cost neutral.

Venese Coodien is COO at Fairview Facilities Management

For more information:

www.fairviewfm.com

Tel: 020 3370 3146