What is a Waste Audit?

A waste audit is where the waste a business, organisation or individual produces is systematically measured. An audit can involve assessing things about your waste stream like:

The types of materials in the waste stream

• How much is being produced
• Fluctuations in waste production
• Where the waste is being produced

Why do a Waste Audit?

If you have decided you want to try to reduce waste, there are a couple of basic questions you first need to ask:

• How much waste do we produce?
• What types of waste do we produce?
• What parts of our operation produce the waste?
• How much is it costing?
• What is the best way to target our efforts at waste reduction?
• How will we know how much progress we make?

A waste audit is a process that will help you answer these questions. It will provide some hard numbers for you to plan and measure your progress. Also if you want to sell the waste reduction initiatives you are planning, there is nothing like being able to show hard numbers and graphs that demonstrate exactly what you can reduce and by how much. It can sometimes be tempting to go ahead and start putting in ideas to reduce waste, but a bit of time and effort taken at the start will pay in the long run.

In summary a waste audit will:

• Help you plan what you are going to do
• Provide a benchmark to measure progress
• Help you sell your waste reduction initiatives
• Establish baseline or benchmark data
• Characterise and quantify the waste streams
• Verify waste pathways
• Identify waste diversion opportunities
• Identify source reduction opportunities
• Assess effectiveness of current systems to improve efficiency of waste management system
• Obtain detailed data on waste generation allowing more accurate product costing

We have completed waste audits for a wide variety of organisations tailored to meet different sector and client requirements.