The importance of staff education in reaching your sustainability goals

Joint effort

But creating this strategy is only part of the work - ensuring that the whole workforce is invested in your sustainability goals is another matter entirely. In order to achieve things like waste minimisation and recycling targets, everyone needs to be on board and working together to achieve the desired outcome. This can be an issue particularly if you have high staff turnover, or if staff have been away from the workplace for a prolonged period of time - as they may have been during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Educating to separate

The main issue for many businesses can be educating staff to separate waste and dispose of it correctly, utilising different bins for different waste streams. The temptation for staff members is often to put everything in general waste, but this works out more costly and ineffective for the business.

Veolia can work with you to create signage, a colour coding system and other materials to inform your staff about which waste to put where, to ensure that you are recycling as much as possible, and to avoid contamination.

Utilising systems effectively

Part of your sustainability strategy may involve the implementation of smart systems to optimise energy usage, for example, a smart lighting system to ensure that lights are only on when they're being used. Whilst these systems can make a big contribution to reducing your carbon footprint, you need to ensure that staff are not counteracting positive changes, for example by using heating systems ineffectively or printing unnecessarily large amounts.

Staff education is something that may be overlooked, as businesses focus on implementing sustainability strategies from a top-level. But ensuring that everyone is on the same page when it comes to recycling and more, can help you reach your targets and become a more sustainable business.