At a ceremony held in the Houses of Parliament, at the Palace of Westminster, in London, at the end of November, Waste King was named a winner of this year’s Green Apple Environment Awards. The awards celebrate environmental best practice and are open to any organisation, community or individual.

Having competed successfully with over 800 other nominations in this year’s International Green Apple Awards, Waste King has now been invited to accept Green World Ambassador status and have its winning paper published in The Green Book – the leading international work of reference on environmental best practice – so that others around the world can follow their lead and learn from their achievement.

The environmentally-friendly waste collection and recycling services specialist normally focuses its attention on helping its clients maximise the amount of their waste that’s recycled and, so, reduce those clients’ carbon footprints to a minimum. However, to win this 2023 International Green Apple Environment Award, Waste King took some of its own medicine – making its own company practices increasingly environmentally-friendly.

According to Waste King’s Managing Director, Glenn Currie, “Our overall aim was to divert 84% of our company’s waste from landfill as well as decreasing the electricity and water we use by 20%. After introducing an education and training programme, our staff now achieve recycling rates of 96% – beating their initial target by an impressive 14% – and they’ve reduced the company’s electricity usage by 28% and water usage by 35%.”

The programme involved benchmarking many areas in the business – including offsetting its carbon footprint with the World Land Trust; using technologies including GPS tracking systems to minimise the mileage its vehicles travelled; making the local community and businesses aware of the project, and ensuring it used state-of-the-art material separation processes to improve its recycling abilities.

Waste King staff now, as a matter of course, separate all waste plastic, paper, glass, wood, ferrous and non-ferrous metal items. Introducing separated containers – Waste King’s waste pods, now known as recycling pods which they also supply to their clients – for each waste material in its office and warehouse has proved a successful initiative to help staff understand the importance of recycling.

According to the Green Apple Award judges, “Waste King has introduced the innovative Waste Pod and has transformed waste management by offering an eco-friendly alternative to skips. Over 100 schools and care homes have adopted this solution, achieving a remarkable 96% diversion from landfills – and Waste King is the sole UK waste company with an in-house recycling station.”

“Producing benchmarking reports each month that detail materials, weights and recycling rates is key to our continuing success,” revealed Waste King’s Operations Director, Andy Cattigan. “We prioritise these materials to be separated by volume and this approach has played a huge role in us continuing to achieve such low volumes of waste going to landfill.

“Experience has shown that the key to achieving these increasing waste management efficiencies – and savings in using electricity and water – is to train your staff and make it possible for them to put that training into practice,” he added. “Having the recycling pods makes taking the ‘recycling route’ readily available – and it’s now company policy to reward staff for their efforts.

“For example, we devote 20% of all items sold or re-used to a bonus fund, which is paid to our staff. Employees also receive a bonus if Waste King achieves an increase in our recycling rates.”

Currently, Waste King fulfils 3,000 customer orders per month and, with new national contracts in place in 2024, aims to grow to 5,000 customer orders a month.

About the Green Apple Awards

Established in 1994, the Green Organisation is an independent, international, non-profit, non-political environment group dedicated to recognising, rewarding and promoting environmental best practice around the world. Key to these aims are its International Green Apple Environment Awards, presented every year in the Houses of Parliament, in London, to companies, councils and communities that are doing their best for the environment. The Green Apple Environment Awards is one of the few British campaigns to be accepted as an automatic feeder scheme into the Brussels-led European Business Awards for the Environment – and many of its winners have gone on to represent their country and win further success abroad.

About Waste King Ltd (https://www.wastekingrubbishclearance.com/)

As a specialist collections operator, formed in 2007 by Glenn Currie and Andy Cattigan, Waste King serves the domestic and commercial markets. It focuses not only on providing a friendly, efficient, cost-effective service but also one which is environmentally friendly. In particular, Waste King’s uniformed, Environment Agency-licensed staff take time to ensure that the maximum amount of waste can be recycled and that all the waste it collects is disposed of in an environmentally friendly way. Waste King aims to create a professional and environmentally responsible solution for both homes and businesses alike by creating the environmentally friendly solution to waste removal and recycling.