Communicating with recycling scheme users in Health and Social Care settings

Internal communication is an important part of making recycling a success in your workplace. If you completed a waste action plan in Step 2, you’ll find this a useful starting point when it comes to communicating your recycling plans with staff, patients and visitors. It will help you to begin by being clear about:

• Why your workplace/practice/hospital should recycle – go back to Step 1 for all the great reasons why your organisation should recycle.

• Who manages waste within your organisation/practice/hospital? – for example, who empties the bins? Name individual employees, cleaners and facilities staff. Point out that it is everybody's responsibility to put their waste in the correct bins. It is important to name the individuals within your organisation that manage the waste contract and can provide information thereto.

• The location and type of recycling bins and storage facilities – the first section of this step will help with this.

• Which external providers manage the waste and recycling collections – and when and how often do collections take place?

• How should items be presented for recycling? – for example, clean, dry and loose.

Setting your recycling communication aims and objectives

Setting communication aims and objectives will help focus your communications on supporting your wider recycling objectives, as well as enabling you to monitor whether they’ve been achieved. Your objectives could be as follows:

• Raise awareness of recycling opportunities in the workplace

• Inform employees of your recycling and waste policy, your organisation’s legal obligations, and what they need to do as individuals

• Make it clear how your company manages its waste, the benefits of recycling and why you want your employees and patients/clients to recycle

• Educate, inform and motivate employees to recycle – provide instructions and practical support on how to recycle in the workplace and for those working remotely

• Change behaviour – all employees choose to recycle, making recycling the norm

An example of an aim and objective might be:

Aim: To encourage the catering services team to start or improve recycling within the establishment’s meals kitchens for inpatients.

Objective: To raise awareness of what can be recycled across the organisation within the catering unit by installing recycling bins, signage and promotional posters in bin areas by the end of 2025.

Good to know

Given the nature of health and social care facilities, which often include large-scale food service operations for patients, staff and visitors, the health and social care sector needs to manage its food waste proactively and efficiently.

There is a significant lack of data from the Northern Ireland health sector, reporting of food waste figures are critical for accountability and awareness tracking.

Learn more about Target, Measure, Act from Guardians of Grub to understand the amount of food waste your organisation is generating.

Planning who you need to tell

It’s essential to communicate your plans effectively to all your staff, patients and visitors to help them understand how, why, when and where to recycle.

Think about the different types of employees – full-time, part-time, temporary or seasonal staff – and the different roles within your organisation:

• Management

• Doctors and Consultants

• Nursing staff

• Facilities staff/cleaners

• Office/Administrative staff

Assigning a named employee to take responsibility for communicating your recycling plan with staff will help make sure everyone is kept informed and doing their bit. It is important that staff know what their roles are in relation to waste management at your facilities.

For larger organisations such as Health Trusts, you may wish to send recycling messages to team leaders to cascade down to individual employees. For example, senior managers will need to brief managers about enforcing your waste and recycling policy, and managers may then need to liaise with waste service providers and directly with the facilities staff or cleaners responsible for sorting and managing waste for collection. Managers, Head of Departments and other team leaders will need to ensure their staff members follow the recycling policy and reinforce what can be recycled, how and where. Larger organisations will likely have a waste policy, this can also act as a training document.

It needs to be made clear to all patients and visitors at your organisation that they need to separate their waste so that it can be recycled. It is imperative to have clear signage so that patients and visitors are clear on the expectation on them to throw away their waste responsibility.

Creating effective communications

Using consistent and complementary messaging across different communication touch points across your organisation – from education emails to signage at recycling points – can help encourage people to recycle and change their behaviour.

Using branding to give your recycling communications a consistent look and feel will:

• Provide a recognisable identity for your recycling information

• Make the messages more recognisable and memorable

• Help build credibility and trust

Creating communication touch points across high-traffic areas in the workplace helps employees understand what they can and can’t recycle. To help with this, we’ve created a tried and tested ‘Business of Recycling’ identity that you can use to show your organisation’s support and commitment to recycling. This, combined with the existing national Recycle Now logo, helps reinforce recycling messages both at home and work.

Download these FREE communications resources to get started. They’re designed for you to print off and include:

• Letterhead/header - to help you promote recycling in the workplace, highlight successes and reinforce the actions you want employees to take

• Email footer – a regular recycling reminder to employees and external audiences

• Instructional recycling posters – in A3, A4 and A5, to show what can and can’t be recycled for each type of waste; these can also double up as bin stickers to ensure materials are collected correctly

Monitoring the impact of your communications

Once you’ve begun your recycling communications, remember to review them regularly to see how much of an impact they’ve had and spot where there may be room for improvement. Note successes so that you can share them with your team to encourage them; success could be specific actions taken to achieve objectives or consistent, credible presentation of meaningful results.

Above all, identify activities that worked well and those that didn’t, and share learning from this. Review the findings, and then list your key recommendations for future communications.