Bywaters Holds Seven Waste Awareness Days in Two Weeks

Bywaters has been increasing our efforts to educate our clients and the public about sustainable waste management, holding seven events in the past two weeks to help our clients increase their recycling rates.

Spreading Awareness of Sustainability

Since the 7th November, Bywaters’ team of Sustainability has been visiting clients all over London with educational materials and a variety of games and activities in order to spread the message about how to increase sustainability and boost recycling rates.

Our regular waste awareness days form a key part of how we work with our clients to achieve the best results possible in terms of waste management improvements; the most effective way to ensure that waste is sorted correctly for recycling is to educate people on the importance of putting different items into the right bin on site. That way our materials recovery facility can easily sort and bale different waste streams for recycling.

Working with Partners in All Sectors

The waste awareness days we have held in the past couple of weeks have all been a tremendous success, and have seen us engage people from all sorts of organisations – from the health service to international development funds.

Making the NHS More Sustainable

On the 12th November, we partnered with Interserve to deliver one of our largest ever waste awareness days for University College Hospitals London NHS Foundation Trust, one of our many clients in the healthcare sector.

The event was held in the atrium of the University College Hospital in central London and engaged both patients and staff by allowing them to take a virtual 3D tour of our materials recovery facility in Bow using state-of-the-art virtual reality headsets.

Visitors to the stall may have been initially attracted by the free sustainability-themed cupcakes that were on offer, but they stayed for the chance to try their hand at our interactive waste sorting game and find out about our sustainable clinical waste management services.

Teaching Something to Our Universities

Bywaters provides waste management services for many of London’s most well-known names in the education sector, and on the 13th and 14th of November our sustainability experts went down to the London School of Economics and the University of Greenwich to educate students about sustainable waste practices.

In Greenwich we partnered up with the university’s Student Sustainability Group during their ‘Green Week’ – once again bringing down virtual reality headsets and a variety of waste sorting games so that environmentally conscious students could learn more about the practicalities of sustainable waste management and the most effective ways to make improvements.

At LSE we set up our stall alongside Dr Bike – an initiative that repairs and services students’ bikes for free – to offer information about sustainability to people committed to travelling around the city in a carbon neutral way. We ran a prize competition with our waste sorting challenge, with the top scoring student awarded a £30 Waterstones gift card and the person in second place getting a reusable Chilly’s bottle.

Spreading Our Message Internationally

On the 18th November our Green Gurus attended the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development’s Green Week fair, along with other companies promoting the use of reusables and other environmentally friendly lifestyle products.

Once again we ran a prize giveaway (this time a bottle of champagne) to entice people to play our waste sorting game – for which we used the site’s own bins and signage so that the information learned through it would be immediately useful to the staff and help start driving up recycling rates.

We had a fantastic reaction from the staff at the EBRD – an organisation founded in the wake of the Cold War to promote the sustainable development of European economies – with many more people getting the chance to take our VR headsets for a spin, and many people asking us broader questions about household recycling and about the notebooks made from recycled coffee cups that we had brought along.

Engaging Multiple Companies through Workspace

Our partnership with the flexible office space provider Workspace gives us a great opportunity to interact with a wide variety of different people at each waste awareness day. Our team visited different Workspaces on the 7th, 18th, and 19th of November and had a fantastic time talking to everyone about sustainability.

We brought along an Urban Smoothie Bike to both Workspace Riverside and Workspace Biscuit Factory, with people able to peddle their way to making themselves a sustainable smoothie, and also organised speed sorting competitions with prizes ranging from bottles of wine to gift vouchers.

At Workspace Vox Studios we brought some more educational materials and answered many questions from people interested in how to be more sustainable. Across the three events people were really interested to know about specific recycling challenges, such as WEEE waste and battery recycling, and also about broader questions of how we can be more sustainable with our clothing choices.

Constantly Raising Awareness

Waste awareness days are our favourite way to engage people and spread the word about our sustainable initiatives, and we’re delighted to have been able to hold so many events recently with our fantastic clients.

Our Green Gurus are always looking to work with more companies who want to help educate both their staff and the public through these events, and we already have plans to visit another three Workspaces before the end of the year. If you’re interested in finding out more about how we can work with you to set up a waste awareness day, then please get in touch.