Sustainability consulting
Electricity gets measured by a meter. Waste does not. The waste section of a sustainability report is pieced together from paperwork and estimates, which is why it is the part people question — and the part worth getting right before anyone asks.
What goes wrong
Electricity and fuel come off meters and invoices, so they are hard to argue with. Waste figures get built from paperwork, estimates and a few assumptions — which is exactly why they are the first thing anyone reviewing your report asks about.
“We divert 82 percent” raises three immediately: 82 percent of what, which sites are included, and what was left out. Publishing the answers alongside the figure closes the subject. Publishing the figure alone opens it.
Zero waste to landfill sounds absolute and is not. Whether burning material for energy counts as landfill-free depends on which program you are measured against, and that single decision can flip a site from passing to failing. Settle it first, not after you have announced it.
If production drops, your diversion rate can rise without you changing anything. Tracking the total weight alongside the percentage is what shows whether you are actually producing less material, rather than just handling the same amount differently.
What sits behind the headline figure
A diversion rate is a conclusion, not evidence. These are the six figures underneath it — and they are what you get asked for the moment anyone looks closely.
The total weight leaving your site, by material and by location. Everything else is calculated from this one figure, so if it is wrong, every percentage you publish is wrong too. It is also the number most companies pull together last, in a hurry, from whatever records they can find.
Reused, recycled, or recovered some other way — counted separately rather than lumped into a single “diverted” figure. They are genuinely different outcomes, and anyone who knows the subject will ask you which is which. Having the answer ready is the whole point.
Burned for energy, burned without it, or buried. These get counted differently by different programs, so a site can qualify as zero-waste-to-landfill under one definition and fail under another. Knowing which bucket each load fell into is what lets you answer that honestly.
Hazardous and non-hazardous material reported apart from each other. Most reporting frameworks require the split, and it is worth having regardless — the two move through different facilities and say different things about how your operation runs.
Material dealt with on your own site versus material shipped somewhere else. These are two separate things to report, and mixing them together is one of the more common mistakes picked up when a report is reviewed.
Whether a figure came off a scale or was worked out from an assumption — marked, line by line. Anyone reviewing your numbers will ask about this. If you already know the answer it is a two-minute conversation; if you do not, it becomes an audit.
Who ends up asking for them
Built once and reshaped for each, instead of rebuilt from scratch every time somebody asks for them in a different format.
If you report using GRI — the most widely used standard — the waste section is three specific disclosures: what you generated, what you kept out of disposal, and what you sent to disposal. They are numbered 306-3, 306-4 and 306-5. The six figures above drop straight into them.
Waste is part of a company carbon number, under the heading Scope 3, Category 5. The emissions figure is worked out from the weight and what happened to it. Record the destination loosely and the carbon number inherits that looseness, usually without anyone noticing until it is questioned.
Increasingly where this starts. A large customer sends a sustainability questionnaire and the waste questions have to be answered by someone. The same six figures answer them — and answering the same way every year matters far more than answering impressively once.
Usually the toughest audience, because they know the operation. They will notice a number that moves without an explanation attached, and that is the question worth being able to answer before it is asked.
What you actually get
A figure by itself prompts a question. The same figure with the workings attached answers it in advance. That is the whole difference between a number you present and a number that holds up under scrutiny.
We produce the waste figures and show how they were reached. What you publish, and how you word it, stays yours.
Questions
Whichever one you use. We produce the waste figures and show how they were worked out; you put them into your report, your customer questionnaire or your framework of choice. We do not write your report for you and would be wary of anyone offering to.
Yes, and the order matters. Find out what you actually produce and where it currently goes first, then set a target that figure can realistically reach. Targets picked before anyone has measured the starting point tend to get quietly dropped a year later.
That is where most of this starts now. The waste questions on those forms come straight out of the same six figures, so once they exist the questionnaire stops being a scramble. Answering it the same way each year counts for more than answering it impressively once.
These figures are easy to produce if they were recorded as the year went along, and painful to reconstruct in the three weeks before a deadline.