About the Health and Social Care recycling guide

Welcome to our workplace Recycling Guide for the health and social care sector!

This guide is for the person responsible for managing waste at your workplace or site.

If you’re a large organisation with multiple departments spread across multiple sites, such as a hospital trust, you may have a dedicated Waste Manager. If you’re a smaller site, such as a General Practice surgery, a residential care home or a dental surgery, your Site Manager or Operational Manager may be responsible for this.

This guide only deals with non-hazardous municipal waste, which NHS England commonly refers to as domestic waste. It doesn’t deal with how to manage other waste streams that may be generated by health and social care activities, such as clinical and dental, hazardous and offensive waste.

We’ll take you through five steps to implementing recycling in your workplace – below is an outline of what we’ll be explaining. Whether you’re a hospital, GP surgery, care home, or opticians, if your workplace is new to recycling, work your way through from Step 1. If you’re after advice on a particular stage, click the links below to jump to the relevant section.

Good to know:  Look at HTM 07-01 – Safe Management of Healthcare Waste published by the Health, Social Services and Public Safety for wider guidance on managing municipal type/non-hazardous waste. This contains an assessment framework to identify whether waste from your sector is healthcare (hazardous waste) or non-hazardous waste.

Here is some guidance with case studies which maybe useful:

• Food waste sorting in hospitals and other healthcare facilities: Where to start?

• Learnings and Case studies from around Europe which include recommendations for preventing and reducing food waste in healthcare

There are a number of sources of information and guidance available to health sector to on how to manage assist in the management of these other waste streams:

• Northern Ireland Business Information - has lots of useful information on using resources efficiently in business sectors (inclusive of the health and care sector), along with links to useful sites and waste management companies.

• Health Technical Memorandum 07-01: Safe and Sustainable Management of Healthcare Waste - This document provides foundational guidance for healthcare waste management, including segregation protocols and color-coding specific to Northern Ireland.

• Northern Ireland Waste Management Strategy - The 2023 update outlines the planned policy framework for waste management, including healthcare sector requirements.

• Clinical Waste Regulations and Authorised Carriers - While focused on hazardous waste, this guidance supports recyclable management by preventing contamination of recyclable streams.

• WRAP has also produced a quick start Action List to help businesses reduce food waste.