Published May 2001

Reduce, recycle waste
to save money at office

By Kimberly Hilden
Herald Business Journal Assistant Editor

Looking to cut costs and boost efficiency in the workplace? Take a look in your wastebasket, waste-management officials say. The solution may start there.

Begin with a waste audit to see what’s going into the waste stream, said Polagaya Fine, a Senior Planner for the Snohomish County Public Works Solid Waste Division. The county offers waste audits, as do other waste-services providers, and the business always can perform a rough audit on itself.

Questions to answer: What’s in there, and how did it get there?

“If you have a piece of paper in the wastebasket, for example, it got there by some kind of process. That’s fine, if you need it. The question is, was there a more efficient way to do that?” Fine said.

Often, the route of a hard-copy purchase order or billing statement adds up in material costs and clerical wages, she said, not to mention the extra time wasted as the order or bill wends its way from department to department, being copied and filed, before action is taken.

Snohomish County has seen firsthand the efficiencies of going paperless after adopting an electronic financial system a couple of years ago, Fine said.

“It’s eliminated the paper vouchering,” she said. “It’s eliminated paper copies of purchase orders or field orders, unless required by the vendor.”

Along with saving money on paper, going electronic has enabled the county to more efficiently track what it buys because the system allows for categorizations and searchability of those items, Fine said.

“And, of course, it speeds up our payment system,” she said. “I used to request a six-week pay (period) from the time the invoices came in to the time we got the check cut, and now we can meet a 30-day net with no problem. Under normal conditions, it actually runs about 20 days.”

The Boeing Co. also has benefited from taking paper out of some processes.

“Boeing has aggressively adopted e-business solutions to reduce waste and improve processes with suppliers, customers and its inside-the-company processes, like filling out expense reports or changing employee benefit plans,” said Dean Tougas, a spokesman for Boeing.

Another point to consider during a waste audit is how much of the material being thrown out could be recycled.

According to Boeing’s Web site, during 1998, the company recycled 92 million pounds of material, translating into $50 million in revenue and cost savings to the company.

That’s a lot of recycling and a lot of savings. But you don’t have to be a big business to reap the financial rewards of recycling.

Often, recycling allows businesses to decrease the volume of garbage that needs to be hauled away, said Laura Kirk, Customer Service Representative for Rubatino Refuse Removal Inc. of Everett. Those savings usually cover the cost of recycling and then some.

For example, Rubatino charges $8.80 a month for weekly pickup of a 90-gallon container of paper to be recycled. Compare that to the $14.35 the company charges for weekly pickup of a 32-gallon can of garbage or the $29.25 charged for weekly pickup of three 32-gallon cans of garbage.

And currently, the company doesn’t charge for pickup of recyclable cardboard.

Even if small businesses don’t generate a lot of one recyclable item, some waste companies have co-mingled recyclable programs, in which businesses can mix their recyclables, said Kristen Staley, an account manager with Waste Management, a waste-services provider.

The best thing for businesses to do is call their local waste-services provider, she said.

For more information on reducing waste in the workplace, call the county’s Solid Waste Division at 425-388-3425 or visit Snohomish County’s Web site, www.co.snohomish.wa.us, and click on the Public Works Department’s link to get to the Solid Waste Division home page.

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