Separating waste

Better separate waste collection.

After procurement, products are used (one-off or long-term) and after use, they are thrown away as waste. We want to be able to offer all the waste we eventually dispose of to our waste processors as separately as possible. If the quality of a monostream is good enough, a waste processor can often recycle it well (R8). Hence, we have made it a goal to collect our waste as separately as possible.

R-ladder
Prevent	R1 - Refuse: Preventing the use of raw materials by abandoning a product and its function.
Reduce raw materials or use them smarter	R2a - Reduce: Reduce use of raw materials or use materials with a longer lifespan. R2b - Redesign: redesigning a product so that it is demountable or so that fewer materials are needed.
Extending product and component life	R3 - Re-use: reuse of a product (second-hand) R4 - Repair: Maintenance and repair of a product. R5 - Refurbish: Refurbishing or modernising a product. R6 - Remanufacture: Reuse of product parts for a new product. R7 - Re-purpose: Reuse of a product for another function.
Beneficial use of materials and resources	R8 - Recycle: Processing used materials into raw materials of the same (high-grade) or lesser (low-grade) quality. R9 - Recover: Incineration of materials with energy recovery.
Dumping	R10 - Landfill: Materials that cannot (now) remain in the production chain are landfilled (e.g. hazardous substances).

Categorising waste

From the Zero Waste programme, we focus on different categories of waste; normal business waste released from office and educational environments, large waste that does not fit in normal bins and hazardous waste released in laboratory environments. Each waste category has its own challenges to collect it better separately.

Hazardous waste we try to limit as much as possible, because there are still almost no possibilities to process it other than by incineration.

Large waste has many logistical challenges. We think about how to use the limited space we have. We design the processes as efficiently as possible so that disposing of bulky waste is also made easy for our employees.

With normal commercial waste, the biggest challenge is that everyone has to be able to make the right choices. We do this by offering waste separation tools in the right way, that everyone is informed about

Separating waste

English text alternative R-ladder

Categorising waste

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