Case Studies

With locations across London and the South, Business Environment operates business centres and serviced offices approaching 1,000,000 sq ft. All locations are in city centres and offer flexible office space, meeting rooms and conferencing facilities.

The issues

1. Decentralised management of waste

A common problem for multi-location businesses is that facilities are managed ‘bottom up’ at site level, because each location will have its own unique requirements. Delivering a co-ordinated waste plan with a consistent level of service across sites can be a huge challenge as day to day operations take priority. Business Environment was experiencing just this problem with the management of its waste.

2. Complicated administration of waste process

Business Environment had a number of contractors in place to manage waste across each of its locations. This meant the process of ensuring waste was being collected as scheduled, skips exchanged, invoices paid, and legislation being adhered to, was over complicated, time consuming, and expensive. Furthermore with numerous companies to deal with, the working relationships between facilities personnel and the many customer service teams they had to communicate with was often impersonal.

3. Lack of information about recycling

The contracts in place with existing suppliers dealt solely with the collection of waste from Business Environment premises. Essentially from this point, Business Environment had no way of observing or demonstrating what happened to its waste post-collection and how much was being recycled or diverted from landfill.

The company itself has a strong Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy. Having visibility of such information was becoming increasingly important, as was the need to get buy in from everyone involved in the creation of waste at each location, to ensure as much waste as possible was being routed into recycling channels at the point of disposal.

The SWR Solution

Standardising processes and tailored site level solutions

Key to SWR’s way of working is to manage the full waste cycle from beginning to end through one contract, one point of contact and one monthly bill. By centralising all aspects of waste management and recycling under one umbrella, SWR created a waste management structure that would remove the time and bother of dealing with individual contractors, multiple invoices and varying monthly charges, whilst ensuring compliance with new and revised waste legislation. By introducing uniform processes at all sites, SWR would ensure each location was correctly and efficiently contributing to Business Environment’s overall environmental goals.

Having carried out waste audits at each of the business centres, SWR’s team developed customised waste plans for each location. With an extensive network of trusted suppliers, SWR was able to utilise its buying power to secure best service at competitive prices and model these into one straightforward contract.

First class customer service

Because the SWR customer service team dealt with all queries across every location, they were able to develop a good understanding of each site, its requirements, and build rapport with its staff to achieve effective and lasting working relationships.

Reporting

Also key to SWRs service is providing full visibility to its customers of waste creation and processing, using comprehensive reporting on the tonnages of individual waste streams being produced and the amount being recycled / diverted from landfill and other costly disposal routes. This tool would allow Business Environment to share its environmental performance to stakeholders internally and externally.

Quarterly reviews of SWR’s service and Business Environments waste output would also identify any necessary changes to service and ensure continuous improvement and a service that accurately reflected Business Environment’s needs.

The Results

• Average recycling rates of 78% on occasion hitting 90%
• Annual cost savings in the region of10% and additional savings where targets are hit
• Benchmarking of recycling allowed demonstration of green credentials and supporting the delivery of business’ wider strategic policies
• Long term effective working relationships between Business Environment and SWR