What is a Waste Audit?

A waste management audit (also known as a waste stream audit) is an analysis of all the items that enter your waste streams. It involves reviewing everything that goes into your dumpsters and bins before they’re collected. Professional waste management audits identify the types and quantities of trash your business produces and their disposal method.

Any organization that wants to improve its recycling, sustainability, and waste management practices starts with a waste stream audit. This provides a real-time assessment of garbage generation to identify areas where you can work to reduce waste, recycle more, and lower your waste management costs.

The standard waste management audit provides an overview of all the trash your organization produces. There are also specific audits that focus on certain waste streams, such as:

• Food waste audit – a record of all the kinds of food thrown out, where it came from, and why it’s being chucked out. This aims to determine the reasons for food waste and identify ways to reduce it.
• Recycling audit – an assessment of the current recycling streams and processes that also helps reduce the volume of solid waste. It can focus on specific recycling streams to explore ways to increase recycling rates.
• Hazardous waste audit – a review of the different types of hazardous materials disposed of by a business. It involves evaluating the storage to ensure it’s safe and that all hazardous waste is separated from other streams.

You can use professionals to conduct a waste audit or carry one out for your business yourself. Good planning, wearing safe protective gear, and following a clear process helps make any waste management audit a success. The time, effort, and requirements may vary depending on the size and type of company you run.

Follow these steps to conduct a waste audit:

• Designate a team – assign a team to conduct the waste audit. This could be any health and safety experts, senior leadership, or those in environmental roles but they must be familiar with the business and its operations. Supply everyone with appropriate PPE including gloves and facemasks.
• Set a time and day(s) – decide a day and time to carry out the audit. Ideally, this should be outside of a busy or quiet period to give an idea of an average day. Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday are common days for conducting waste audits.
• Review the site – walk around your site (depending on its size) and assess the dumpsters, bins, and any other trash containers in place. This provides a good overview of your facility and where garbage is stored, which is useful to plan an efficient audit.
• Weigh the waste – sort through the different waste streams your organization produces and weigh them. This gives a good idea of the volume of trash your company produces. If you take garbage from an average day, you can multiply it to work out a rough estimate of your weekly, monthly, or annual trash production.
• Sort through trash – dive deeper into the garbage in your dumpsters and bins. Identify any items thrown into the wrong container (such as glass in a solid waste dumpster). This highlights contamination and an area to improve recycling.
• Analyze audit results – review the results to work out how much trash your business creates, and which waste streams are most common. Use this information to identify areas where you should aim to reduce waste or where you need extra recycling solutions (if there’s lots of paper in a solid waste dumpster then maybe add a paper recycling dumpster to your collections).
• Make improvements – implement any changes such as changing the sizes of the dumpsters or bins you use or adding more into your collection schedule. Keep an eye on your recycling rates and trash production and conduct another audit in the near future to track your progress.

You can conduct a waste audit yourself but if you want a job done right it’s sometimes best to use a professional waste auditor. Many businesses provide expert waste audit services. These deliver great insight into the current state of your waste management processes from the types, volumes, and storage to disposal.

At Business Waste, we offer waste audit services for organizations of any size and industry. One of our experts can assess the types of trash you produce and advise on the best kinds and sizes of dumpsters you need and collection frequencies. Saving your business money and protecting the environment are at the heart of it.

Get a free no-obligation quote for a professional waste audit today – call 888 584 2118 or contact us online.