“As well as saving money and improving our overall recycling rates, it also helps us to evidence continual improvement which assists us with our ISO14001 Environmental Management Systems accreditation”.
Kevin Grant – VocaLink’s Health, Safety and Environment Manager
Company background
VocaLink is a global payments partner to banks, businesses and governments. Last year, the company’s award-winning platforms processed over 11 billion transactions with a value of £6 trillion. In the UK, VocaLink processes over 90% of salaries, more than 70% of household bills and almost all state benefits. Almost every business and individual in the UK benefits from VocaLink’s technology.
The company seeks to drive beyond industry best practice in everything it does, including the way that it manages its own sustainability programme. VocaLink is proud to be a ‘zero-waste-to-landfill’ organisation and is continuously looking at innovative ways to recycle more of its waste.
Issues
VocaLink has an excellent track record as a responsible business and in mid-2015 put in place processes to divert all of its waste away from landfill. Nevertheless, VocaLink knew that improvements in its recycling levels could be achieved and began focussing its attention on one particular waste stream that was growing rapidly; paper beverage cups.
The company has four offices in the UK with more than 750 employees. At the largest site in Rickmansworth, there are four free-vend machines, that dispense, approximately, 12,000 drinks each month, and one paid-for drinks machine in the café that serves around 6,000 cups per month. Each one of these drinks is served in a paper hot beverage cup. It is estimated that, across all sites, as many as 400,000 paper cups are used each year. VocaLink recognised that this was a significant use of paper cups and so the ambition to recycle as close to 100% of these would represent a significant achievement.
Solution
As the UK’s only workable paper cup recovery and recycling scheme, VocaLink contacted Simply Cups in December 2015 to help them resolve its cup issue. A meeting was held to review current procedures and estimate the number of cups used so that Simply Cups could advise on best practice.
Starting with the Rickmansworth location, Simply Cups devised a recovery and collection process that would result in virtually all of the cups used on site being recovered and recycled, and without having to change the supply, or specification, of VocaLink’s paper cups.
By June 2016, confident that Simply Cups’ methodology would meet the company’s needs, VocaLink was ready to go live and so a total of eight 110 litre cup recycling bins were strategically placed across all 4 floors of the building, including the café. In each bin a (recycled) liner is placed, which makes collecting the cups easy and mess-free.
A launch event was then held, with Simply Cups’ mascot ‘Cupbert’ as guest of honour, with the aim of introducing the new cup recycling procedures to the employees and explaining why cup recycling is important to VocaLink and the environment.
VocaLink also made use of its intranet, the Grid, to communicate the arrival of the bins, informing the staff of what can go in them, and what can’t. A header card was also used on each bin to clearly indicate how the bins were to be used. The company recognises that there needs to be an ongoing educational process in order to meet its 100% recycling target, therefore regular communications will be made via the Grid.
Results
Introducing new recycling procedures always takes time to bed down, but the results so far have been extremely encouraging. Around 70,000 cups have so far been diverted away from general waste and, therefore, recycled instead of being incinerated or sent to landfill. Based on VocaLink’s total annual paper cup usage, it is estimated that savings of 47% could be achieved using Simply Cups, against the cost of disposal via general waste.
VocaLink
Results
Introducing new recycling procedures always takes time to bed down, but the results so far have been extremely encouraging. Around 70,000 cups have so far been diverted away from general waste and, therefore, recycled instead of being incinerated or sent to landfill. Based on VocaLink’s total annual paper cup usage, it is estimated that savings of 47% could be achieved using Simply Cups, against the cost of disposal via general waste.
VocaLink
“Joining the Simply Cups scheme made perfect sense to us, particularly as it required only a small investment in operational expenditure and our time to communicate details of the scheme to our employees via our intranet”.
Kevin Grant – VocaLink’s Health, Safety and Environment Manager
