Checklist For Audit of Recycling Facility

No matter if you’re an established program administrator or just beginning, having a checklist for audit of your recycling facility can save both money and waste. Utilize it to inspect bins throughout your facility to ensure they are appropriately labeled and placed.

Prior to an audit, provide your team with personal protective equipment and any tools that they might need, such as labels, permanent markers, weighing scales, large plastic sheets and containers.

1. Inventory of Equipment

As part of the recycling process, specialized equipment reduces waste material into an easily reused format. This equipment may include shredders, pulverizers, compactors or balers.

Facility managers need to conduct an inventory of equipment on-site to assess how it’s functioning, in order to identify any areas requiring improvement and ensure employees use appropriate machines for each waste type.

After your inventory is complete, it is time to conduct a waste audit. In this stage of your efforts, collect samples from every disposal location at your facility (from individual office bins to designated corporate e-waste locations) and sort them by material category before taking photos of each pile sorted this way. After the audit is over, spend some time analyzing your data as this is where opportunities to enhance your program arise.

2. Inventory of Materials

Recycling facilities provide an important service. Recyclable materials are brought here and processed through waste management programs or municipal recycling facilities (MRF), the latter of which sort and sort household waste before producing reusable materials that can be sold back to manufacturers to replace raw, natural resources.

Reusing materials helps the environment by decreasing landfill waste. Furthermore, this process consumes less energy than producing products from raw materials – saving natural resources while cutting pollution levels.

An audit is an essential tool to help a business assess how its waste flows are being managed and identify how improvements could be made. An effective waste audit involves looking through records/data, walking around facilities taking notes/photos and sorting trash to gain an idea of what is occurring. An efficient team should conduct the audit consisting of members from procurement, facilities and janitorial departments in order to carry it out effectively.

3. Inventory of Recycling Equipment

Industries and manufacturing operations often employ specialized machinery to reduce any leftover materials from production or processing and convert them into fractions suitable for recycling. Such devices may include shredders, pulverizers, compactors, granulators or balers equipped with hydraulic power that break them down into small sizes suitable for reuse or repurposing.

Assorted waste should not be combined, as this may contaminate the recycling stream and incur extra processing costs when processed. Before sending materials for recycling, always check with your provider that they accept all of them – some recycling centers require different materials be collected separately (multi-stream recycling), whereas facilities that store combustible waste for composting and mulching must abide by 30 TAC Chapter 330’s storage, recordkeeping, reporting and inspection requirements.

4. Inventory of Recycling Materials

Recycling facilities differ from landfills by turning waste into useful materials that can be reused to make new products. This helps reduce waste sent directly to landfills while conserving natural resources like oil, coal and mineral ores.

Recycling facilities often sort and prepare various waste streams, including paper and cardboard, plastic, and glass for sale to manufacturers. A mixed recycling facility (MRF) handles paper and cardboard collection while dedicated plastic or metal recycling centers specialize in sorting these commodities.

Some items cannot be recycled at recycling facilities, including wet or dry cleaning bags, aluminum foil and intimate hygiene products (like sanitary towels, tampons or nappies). Instead these types of waste are typically sent directly to landfills; moreover it’s not uncommon for recyclables to become contaminated by other trash which damages machinery at recycling plants and decreases product quality as a result.