Businesses Turn to Dumpster Diving to Save Money

Dumpster diving isn’t just for freegans and gutter punks anymore. Businesses are starting to see the benefits of assessing what they’re throwing away and whether they could save money by changing their ways – and that involves taking a stinky tour of their own dumpsters.

Burt’s Bees is one notable example of a company that “found money in a dumpster”. Employees donned hazmat suits and sloshed through two weeks’ worth of trash to find recycling opportunities that could cut expenses. What they found saved them $25,000.

From GreenBiz.com:

With many corporations setting sustainability goals of curbing trash and improving recycling, the dumpster dive is an instructive way of guiding them to hit those targets.

Businesses are also finding new revenue streams in their garbage by taking items that were hauled away to the landfill in the past and instead selling them to someone else for cash — a boon is a slow economy. In addition, many companies seeking LEED certification are sifting through their trash as part of waste stream audits to earn credits toward that seal of approval from the U.S. Green Building Council.

While there may be a certain “yuck” factor to picking through your company’s garbage, experts insist the exercise makes a strong impression on employees that can inspire behavior change with far greater impact than any written report or e-mail alert, Norman says.

Burt’s Bees has a goal of sending zero waste to landfills by 2020, and they managed to get their 40 tons of waste per month down to 10 within 18 months. Then they got stuck, hence the dumpster diving. They saved their trash for two weeks and sorted through it to find items that should have been recycled and items that could be recycled if they could find the proper facilities. The company views the effort as a way to teach their 300-plus employees to be more careful about what they’re throwing away.

GreenBiz.com has several more examples of how companies managed to save lots of money and meet sustainability goals at the same time. It’s inspiring stuff, and business owners should definitely give it a read. It’s important for people to realize that being more mindful of the waste we produce can not only keep millions of tons of trash from sitting in a landfill indefinitely, it can save us money, too.

Link [GreenBiz.com]
Photo credit: Flickr user Lunauna

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