CBW Retailers

Great Forest Australia was contracted to work with a busy food court and retail complex in the heart of Melbourne to reduce waste to landfill.

This complex has 30 retail tenants, 17 of which are food-based. These food based tenants included restaurants, bakeries, popular lunch eateries, cafes and a commercial catering company. Other tenants included women’s fashion stores, a convenience store, gym, travel agent and hairdresser.

A comprehensive waste audit was performed, assessing one days’ worth of waste and recycling from all retailers.

This audit found organic waste made up 35% of the landfill by weight, whilst another 25% consisted of paper, cardboard and commingled containers such as plastic, metal and plastic containers.

The audit also found that the contamination rate in the cardboard recycling stream was very low. With a low contamination rate in recycling, and high volumes of recyclable waste in the landfill, this site showed great potential to dramatically increase recycling levels.

Great Forest Australia carried out a comprehensive analysis of the audit data and waste costs. The Great Forest Australia team also had discussions with cleaning staff and tenants to ascertain any potential barriers to an improved recycling program. Taking into consideration the client’s recycling targets, as well as an assessment of the waste and recycling areas, the following recommendations were made:

• Implementation of an organics recycling program for tenants
• Implementation of a commingled recycling program for tenants
• Waste and recycling disposal area – clean up, re-design and more user-friendly
• Arranging for cleaning staff to empty bins in the waste and recycling area more frequently so that bins were are always available for tenants to use (ie not full or over flowing)
• Implementation of an education program with all tenants including signage and recycling guides.
• Provision of additional bins/receptacles for recycling within tenancies

Together with the client, Great Forest Australia project managed the implementation of the program and had many face to face meetings with the tenants, engaging them in the program, providing them with information, signage, bins and follow up.

The follow up waste and recycling audit showed that the recycling rate had more than doubled.

One of the big success stories of this program was an initiative that came from the client – the installation of an‘organic bus’ for retailers. A dedicated cleaning staff member was scheduled to take the ‘bus’ (an organic recycling wheelie bin) to each food retailer twice a day (morning and afternoon) to collect any organic waste they had separated for recycling.

There are many advantages of introducing the organic bus:

• It is a ‘service’ to retailers. It saves the tenant time (they don’t have to take the waste to go the waste room themselves to deposit the organic waste into the recycling bin). This creates additional good-will between the property management and tenants
• Tenants get into the habit of separating their organic waste, as the bus makes it quicker and easier to participate
• The cleaning staff member taking the bus to the retailers is able to check for contamination and provide feedback to the tenant if there is contamination in the organic waste.

It is a demonstrated show of commitment to the program from the property manager and owner. This leadership leads to an increase in uptake by tenants.