Successful waste management in your organization

Many organizations have started putting in place a new system to improve the way they ‘manage’ waste. Whilst many have succeeded; more have failed. In this paper, we discuss the common pitfalls and how to avoid them. Notes: the contents here are entirely based on our hands-on experiences through our work with our clients.

Let’s first explore examples of what has been implemented by many companies already:

• Installation of biogas-fertilizer machine for food waste
• Separation of waste into recyclable vs. non-recyclable
• Resale of ‘virgin’ defected products/office paper to junk shops,etc.

At first glance, these initiatives are good starting points to prepare for something more comprehensive in waste management. But only when working hand-in-hand with our clients, we realized that these initiatives are ‘siloed’ and ‘one-time fad’ in nature and that caused more harm than good to the implementation of an overall sustainable and systematic waste management. As a result, we discovered 4 repeated major pitfalls as highlighted below.

1. Failure to recognize and to address the different motivations of all stakeholders
2. Following of trendy themes more than internal operationality. This leads to a failure to allow learning time to take place for each individual/department to be able to contribute and create a desirable impact.
3. Lack of willingness to invest in practical solutions to facilitate the change. More spending was heavily placed on marketing to generate momentum more than on incentivizing staff or upgrading garbage rooms/space for segregation and storage.
4. Wrong and/or no performance indicators to benchmark and monitor what the company is actually trying to accomplish from this initiative

At GEPP, we believe that for an organization to achieve a sustainable goal in waste management, it needs to embed it into a day-to-day operation by creating ‘Value’ and it’s more than money!

GEPP Value Creation Framework for Corporate Waste Management serves as a quick check before you start to spend money on those new bins! To avoid those pitfalls aforementioned, you should start asking questions around the 5 dimensions:

1. Brand — Group or subsidiary/Partners and you/You first then Partners?/Consortium?
2. Monetary incentives (external) — who outside of your organization is affected financially
3. Convenience & Practicality — is your model too ideal to be implemented with your current infrastructure?
4. Relationship Management — besides monetary factor, whose work are you going to disrupt with your model? How’s that going to play out for a relationship? Can you say no?
5. Monetary incentives (internal) — what do your staff want? Are they losing or gaining something from this initiative?

GEPP stands for sustainable waste management and we would want (more than anything else) to see companies succeed in taking care of their waste sustainably and efficiently because that’s the only way we see how our waste crisis can be overcome. Please feel free to contact us for project inquiries at geppthailand@gmail.com.

GEPP Author:

Mayuree is the Co-founder and CEO of GEPP. She is passionate in driving the change in how waste is managed for better environment. She is specialized and experienced in implementing transformation programs for organizations and data analytics.