22/10/2024

The APA recently released the results of our inaugural Sustainability Survey, alongside five recommendations for publishers to take action immediately. One of these recommendations was to:

• Set up office recycling for paper, glass, soft and hard plastic, metal, batteries and e-waste.

Allen & Unwin has been improving its office recycling program over the past few years, adding hard plastic, metal, and glass recycling bins; engaging a composting service; collecting blister packs to return to chemists; and including information on office recycling in its staff induction.

Allen & Unwin publisher and digital publishing director Elizabeth Weiss shares the company’s office recycling journey, and looks ahead to their next project:

Office recycling at Allen & Unwin

When Allen & Unwin set up a new Green Committee in early 2020, we wanted to make an impact quickly in our Sydney head office. We already had recycling for paper and cardboard, and solutions for batteries and e-waste. We could recycle more.

During the pandemic lockdowns, determined volunteers took hard plastic, metal and glass home to their yellow bins. To their relief our building manager then provided a bin for these.

We researched composting, looking at domestic solutions like Bokashi bins and a rooftop compost bin. But an office is like a sharehouse on steroids, and we needed a solution that required less maintenance. We settled on a commercial composting service, with caddies in the kitchens and weekly large bin collection. We’ve learnt compost training needs to be on the new staff induction checklist and we need good signage, otherwise we find plastic bags and food packaging in the caddies.

We are delighted to see our office landfill garbage has shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be. Can we reduce it further? It seems soft plastic recycling is starting up on a small scale after the REDcycle supermarket collection fiasco, and this is our next research job.

Recently some chemists have started accepting blister packs for recycling, and we are collecting them in the office. We hope that making the effort to recycle a wide range of items in our office will encourage staff to develop new habits they’ll take home.

Recycling is much better than sending all our rubbish to landfill, but sadly it is not a perfect solution for our consumer lifestyle. Glass, steel and aluminium can be effectively recycled into new glass, steel and aluminium products, with very little waste. Composting is an essential part of a circular economy. However, paper fibres degrade when recycled and can only be made into lower quality paper products. Plastics can be difficult to recycle, and apparently much of the hard plastic collected in Australia isn’t actually recycled. Soft plastics are even harder to recycle properly.

Can we change our habits a little to avoid takeaway lunches in plastic packaging, and bring lunch from home in a reusable container rather than a plastic bag we throw away? Can we remember to bring our reusable cup for our morning coffee? Can we replace the Glad Wrap roll in the kitchen with a compostable food wrap?

The devil is always in the detail, but we’ll continue to look for solutions.

Develop your organisation’s sustainability practices

If you’d like to make your office operations more sustainable like Allen & Unwin, the APA’s Greener Publishing Guide has a section on better business practices.

You can also learn more about our sustainability survey and recommendations for publishers.