What is Wishcycling and How Can your Business Avoid it?
12 months ago, the UK government announced a novel piece of legislation, simplifying recycling procedures for both households and businesses. These new requirements, set to be introduced over the next two years aims to, amongst other things, crack down on wishcycling. Wishcycling consists of incorrectly recycling waste, and across a business could have larger effects upon your sustainability practices. Read on to discover more about wishcycling, it’s negative effects and how you can avoid it.
What is wishcycling?
Wishcycling, in simple terms, involves tossing waste into the recyclin, and hoping that it is eligible. However, often the materials involved are inappropriate for recycling, and can cause problems further down the line. Commonly wishcycled materials include:
- Cling Film- Tangle in machinery and disrupt recycling processes.
- Cooking and Drinking Glasses – Due to their uses, these will not break down, or recycle as required.
- Crisp Packets – Comprised of an unrecyclable plastic.
- Wet Cardboard – Clog up and slow down machinery.
- Tissues and Kitchen Roll – Often contaminated and can cause machine clogs.
These items are incompatible with recycling practices in the UK, so ensuring that you and your colleagues are aware of this is important, but there is also a second type of prevalent wishcycling.
Why is wishcycling harmful?
As stated above, there are a variety of negative permutations to both forms of wishcycling. Firstly, contamination can occur, meaning that the entire batch of recycling may have to be sent to landfill. This means that, without wishcycling procedures, any other recycling practices can be undone by uninformed decisions.
As alluded to through items such as wet cardboard and cling film, rash wishcycling can slow down the entire recycling process. This is as certain, ineligible materials can overload sorting systems, while also potentially causing clogs and failures in crucial machinery. These batches can then also end up being sent to landfill.
These two outcomes combine to make wishcycling an extremely harmful and negative process, that can undermine your recycling practices and harm your business’s image, due to poor sustainability practices.
How to avoid wishcycling
Luckily, there are a variety of actions your business can follow to avoid wishcycling to the best of your ability. These are outlined below, alongside a set of helpful tips, to ensure that your business operates more sustainably.
Employee education – Step one in the battle against wishcycling should be to educate employees on the do’s and don’ts of recycling. This will help in informing others about the materials to avoid, and hopefully encourage practices as simple as cleaning office waste before placing them in the bin. On a business-wide level, once the information has been shared, the effects should shortly follow.
Auditing – Auditing your current waste practices can help you to greater understand your business’s points of failure when it comes to recycling and identify where more specific action is needed. Conducting audits regularly can help to track any trends that develop over time, and reveal crucial insights.
Waste management – We understand that each business and locality has different recycling practices and regulations. Working with experts in waste management can help you cater to the specifics of your situation and remove the burden from your business’s shoulders. Waste management firms can also provide expert advice and solutions, meaning that you can reap the benefits of our experience, and won’t have to navigate the difficult topic of wishcycling alone.
Your business should address the problem of wishcycling, as, if repeated across a business, it can cause large effects upon your recycling practices as a whole. Practices such as recycling audits, employee education and working with waste management experts can combine to create a cleaner future for your business.
