Recycling policy: a waste commitment that survives contact with the bin

A recycling policy is easy to write and hard to make true. Most versions describe an aspiration — we are committed to minimising waste — and say nothing about which bin a used coffee cup goes in, which is the only question anybody standing in a kitchen actually has. A policy that does not answer the practical question gets ignored in practice while remaining perfectly accurate on paper.

What a recycling policy should state

• Which streams are separated on site, named as the bins are labelled rather than in general terms.
• What specifically does not go in each, since contamination is what sends a whole container to landfill.
• Who is responsible for each area, because shared responsibility produces contaminated bins.
• Where the waste actually goes after collection, which is the part most policies cannot answer.
• How confidential paper is handled, which is a different route with different evidence.
• What happens to electrical equipment, batteries and anything hazardous, each of which has its own legal route.

Why contamination decides everything

A recycling container with the wrong material in it can be rejected in full, which means a conscientious office can produce a worse outcome than one that separates nothing. The practical consequence is that fewer streams done properly beat more streams done approximately — two bins everybody understands outperform five that require judgement. Labelling with photographs of the actual items rather than category names makes a measurable difference, and the single highest-return change in most offices is removing individual desk bins, because they are where mixed waste is created without anybody deciding to create it.

Find out what your contractor actually does with each stream and write it down. Several organisations have discovered, publicly and embarrassingly, that carefully separated material was being combined after collection — and the only defence is having asked, in writing, before making any public claim.

Measuring and claiming honestly

1. Record weights or container counts by stream rather than estimating percentages.
2. Track contamination rejections, since that number is the one that moves outcomes.
3. Compare against your own baseline rather than a national figure.
4. Avoid claiming recycling rates you cannot evidence from contractor data, because that is the claim most likely to be challenged.
5. Keep waste transfer documentation, which is a legal requirement as well as the evidence behind any statement you make.

Ettex Wiki suits the policy itself — one page, the bins as they are actually labelled, reviewed on a date — where everybody can reach it rather than in an attachment nobody opens. The weights and rejections belong in a sheet beside it, since a commitment without measurement is the version that quietly stops being true.