Waste

Pay attention to:

• If your waste is collected on demand, you will receive a removal receipt. You can add up the removal receipts yourself, or you can ask your waste collector for an annual statement. Every professional waste collector can generate such a statement without hassle and fax/send it to you.
  Data carriers (tapes, CD-ROMs) can be entered as mixed company waste. This waste stream is burned, and so the environmental burden is equal to that of mixed company waste. You can therefore add the weight of this waste to that of the mixed company waste.
• The environmental burden of different streams of waste paper is similar. It is not possible to enter different streams of waste paper separately. The profit in separating white and coloured paper or cardboard is mainly in lower waste costs, not in profit for the environment.

Demolition waste by demolition companies

Demolition waste is likely to present a large environmental burden compared to the accommodation activities. We therefore recommend that demolition companies:

• Make an Envirometer for your accommodation activities, including transport.
• If you want to be made aware of the environmental burden of your demolition waste as well:
  • Make a copy of this Envirometer year, titled ‘with demolition waste’.
  • Add (an estimate of) your demolition waste to the copy.
• Now turn to the chart of the Envirometer and you will see two bars. The first is likely to be much smaller than the second.
• By going to ‘personal chart settings’ you can go back to just viewing the accommodation Envirometer.
• Based on the results, you can decide for yourself whether you want to include the demolition waste streams over the next few years. Our advice would be to include the demolition waste only if:
  • Making a fair assessment of the demolition waste does not take too much effort
  • You can in fact influence the environmental burden of your demolition waste; that is to say that you expect to be able to improve on the way in which you separate your demolition waste with a view to the environmental burden over the next few years.

Waste in the environmental graph, CO-2-graph and CO2-footprint

In the Envirometer, waste is included in the environmental graph and there are key figures for waste separation and, for example, for kg waste/employee. The environmental impact of the waste flows will be determined based on the extent to which the waste is being recycled, burned and/or landfilled. We therefore consider waste from the perspective of the Circular Economy. The more waste that is being recycled, the lower the environmental impact.

Waste is not visible in the CO2-graph and in the CO2-footprint, because the CO2-impact of the waste-phase cannot be considered seperate from the resources from which it originates. Many sorted waste flows would have a higher CO2-emission than unsorted waste flows, if we would only take into the equation the CO2-emissions from the collecting, separating and grinding of waste. Take a look at this article on the Envirometer webiste for more information.