Recycling & Sustainability update 🌍

Recycling & Sustainability update 🌍

One of the big things we’ve always been very conscious of, but have revisited lately is our impact as a building with regards to sustainability.

We’re already powered by 100% renewable electricity, send zero waste to landfill and have eliminated as much single use plastics as possible throughout all of our supplies (that’s mainly cleaning and kitchen supplies - teas/coffee/soft drinks e.t.c.).

Where possible our repeat deliveries (e.g. our milk & teas) come via bike and we use brands we think are friendly to the earth.

But there were a few more things that have continued to bug us, which we’ve made some changes to this month…

Increasing our recycling rates ♻️

A lot of the waste we produce goes into the little office bins dotted around private offices and open plan spaces. But none of this gets recycled, because anything not recyclable put in them — e.g. a banana, tea bag or lunch takeaway box — spoils the ability for us to recycle the rest. So we’ve made a few changes:

  • First of all, we’re introducing paper & card recycling
  • and secondly, we’re adding more mixed recycling bins centrally on each floor, with the intention of reducing our reliance on un-recyclable small office bins

We’d like to encourage their use. We’re going to remove the small office bins from the communal office spaces, and potentially extend that to private offices to encourage and improve our recycling rates based on feedback we’ve received - we’d welcome feedback from more teams either way on that.

But having dedicated recycling bins is one thing - it’s just as important that the bins are used properly. The mixed recycling and paper bins are for dry, clean materials and should never contain any food, liquids (including tea bags or coffee granules), or food contaminated packaging. If in doubt, place in general waste bins - that stuff won’t get recycled into new materials, but it does get burned in South-East London and turned into electricity 🙂

We’ll continue to empty general waste daily (any bins not marked as either mixed or paper/card recycling are general waste), but paper and mixed recycling will now be emptied as and when they get full. Oh and our new bins are also made entirely from recycled UK post-consumer plastic!

More sustainable printing 🖨️

Our new printer uses high capacity ink tanks instead of cartridges, and our A4 paper is now produced from the recycled paper waste from our paper recycling bins.

Toilets 🚽

As you’ve probably seen, we've made a few changes to the toilets. By switching to hand dryers we’ll save on some of the 10,000 paper hand towels we use and dispose of every month (they aren’t recyclable once used). They are massively energy efficient and of course come from green energy.

Our toilet paper is sustainable bamboo toilet paper from Cheeky Panda, and we use bulk soaps from Ecover to reduce single use plastics.


Read more about our sustainability efforts here.