Adriana Olaya Rodriguez, Sustainability and Communications Manager at Rubbermaid Commercial Products (RCP), explores how waste movement logistics can make or break your recycling systems.
It’s a common scenario: your facility has invested in pristine, colour-coded recycling bins. Clear signage hangs above every station. Staff understand what goes where, and they’re motivated to help make a positive impact.
Yet, despite all of this, your contamination rates remain stubbornly high and your recycling targets frustratingly out of reach.
If this sounds familiar, then don’t worry, you’re not alone. As organisations across the country get to grips with new recycling legislation and ambitious targets, they’re discovering that even the most thoughtfully designed and professionally executed system can fail.
It’s all because there’s a critical blind spot in how we think about waste management.
Movement matters – Understanding the full waste journey
Before we can examine where most recycling systems are falling short, we need to first understand the full waste management journey.
The best way to think of this is as a five-step process:
- Step 1 | Front of house – The first stage of the waste management flow is when staff or customers separate and deposit waste into the correct bins.
- Step 2 | Back of house – This involves staff members depositing waste into the correct bins.
- Step 3 | Waste movement – This is an often-overlooked crucial step, where waste from bins is moved to collection points.
- Step 4 | Transport – Collected waste is transported by a contractor to a treatment facility.
- Step 5 | Treatment – Received waste is processed and either recycled or sent to landfill or incineration.
The challenge for many waste management systems is that they focus too much on the first and last steps. But it’s the bit in the middle, the logistics of moving waste from one stage to another, that remains the missing link in recycling success.
Until we address this critical phase, all of the hard work and investment that’s gone into better recycling inside your facility could be null and void.
Waste management’s blind spot
The problem for most organisations is not what happens at the bin. It’s what happens after. Between the moment someone deposits an item in the right receptacle and the point where it reaches an external collection point, there’s a hidden phase that we often see organisations miss during field visits.
It’s in this stage that your entire recycling system is most vulnerable to breakdown through cross-contamination, poor equipment, and inconsistent handling practices.
Perhaps a recycling bag tears during transport, spilling its contents into a general waste cart. Maybe a team member, who lacks proper equipment, decides to combine multiple streams into a single trolley for efficiency. Or a makeshift container fails, forcing staff to dispose of everything as contaminated waste.
These may sound like isolated incidents, but they’re actually systematic failures that happen every day in facilities across the country, undermining the hard work and effort that organisations are putting into their recycling programmes.
Counting the cost of poor waste movement
When your internal waste movement fails, it can impact every aspect of your recycling operations, causing a ripple effect that touches compliance, culture and sustainability. Add them together, and the cost of your waste management blind spot can quickly add up.
Contamination – Unlike contamination at the point of disposal, where a single item might spoil one bin, contamination that occurs during the movement phase can compromise entire waste streams in seconds.
It’s an issue that’s only compounded by volume. After all, while a single front-of-house bin might only contain a small amount of waste, a trolley which ferries recycling around your facility will handle significantly more at a time.
When contamination occurs at this scale, recyclables that dozens of people have carefully separated over hours or days become worthless in moments.
Compliance – The financial implications of poor waste movement don’t end with disposal costs; however, they can also extend to compliance.
From March 31, 2025, new Simpler Recycling legislation brought in under the Environment Act 2021 means businesses in England with more than 10 full-time employees must separate dry mixed recyclables, paper and cardboard, and food from their general waste before collection from their premises.
This legislation placed renewed emphasis on recycling and requires businesses to have multi-stream recycling in place so that items can be separated at source. With the prospect of hefty fines and even civil sanctions, poor waste movement processes could cause non-compliance that could prove costly for organisations.
Hygiene and safety – From a hygiene perspective, poor waste movement can create issues throughout a facility. Makeshift or inappropriate equipment, such as poor-quality trolleys and containers, can become contaminated. Because they’re not easy to clean, this can lead to a buildup of bacteria, potentially attracting pests and causing unpleasant odours.
Cultural impact – While contamination risks and compliance issues are easy to measure, one thing that’s a lot harder to gauge is the human impact of your waste movement blind spot.
Part of that comes from the frustration that’s caused. Without proper waste movement systems in place, hardworking staff can be left to struggle with unsuitable equipment and unclear processes that force them into developing workarounds and compromises that undermine recycling efforts.
This is more than just an operational concern, but a cultural one. Organisations increasingly understand that they need buy-in from every level if they’re going to achieve their recycling goals.
But this kind of employee engagement can quickly come undone when frontline workers face daily frustrations. That’s especially true for employees who are working hard to segregate waste, only to find out that their efforts have been undone at a later stage when recycling is mixed.
Employee wellbeing – The final factor we have to consider when measuring the cost of gaps in your recycling systems is the toll it takes on your employees’ wellbeing.
When equipment is poorly designed, too heavy and lacking proper handles and wheels, the tasks involved in waste movement become significantly more demanding. As a result, the poor ergonomics of makeshift equipment can add to daily strain.
Choosing the right tools for the job
No matter what kind of waste your business makes or your people move, the equipment you choose to handle it can make all the difference.
In many facilities, waste movement is done using whatever’s at hand. Think black bags, makeshift trolleys and repurposed equipment that was simply never designed with recycling in mind. But by choosing the right tools for the job, you can help to close the gap, maximising your recycling rate and minimising the risks to your employees.
Every facility is different, and so the equipment you need to move your waste will be different too. The best place to start is to carry out a thorough audit that identifies where waste needs to travel once it’s been deposited and analyses any issues it may face along the way. This process needs to consider everything from volumes and distances to tricky terrain, tight corridors and lifts.
Once you have a clear picture of the journey your waste will need to travel, you can begin to choose the right tools for the job. Trucks, trollies and dollies are great. But you need to think about what you need to effectively move waste in different parts of your facility.
When it comes to selecting the right equipment, don’t forget about the importance of ergonomics. Poorly designed handling equipment not only puts unnecessary strain on staff but also impacts productivity. So make waste movement easier, faster and safer with ergonomically designed products.
The final piece of the waste movement puzzle is training. Once the right equipment is in place, ensure that you educate your team on each truck or trolley, getting them comfortable with any key features and what they should be used for.
This will help them to get the most out of your investment and understand how it can help them to overcome any issues they face during waste movement.
Bridging the gap
Traditionally, the waste management conversation has centred on endpoints, focusing on getting people to use the right bins and then ensuring that what’s been collected reaches the right destination. But as we’ve explored, true success also relies on what happens in between.
If we’re truly going to make the most of our recycling initiatives, then we need to address the waste management blind spot. This isn’t about adding extra complexity or cost to your organisation. It’s about recognising the weakest link in your systems so that you can make improvements to ensure your efforts are as effective as possible.
The path to success doesn’t require wholesale change. Instead, by investing in ergonomic tools and equipment that are purposefully designed to handle the unique challenges of waste movement, you can make small changes that add up to have a big impact on your recycling system.