home » news

Green-Works is an award winning social enterprise and registered charity dedicated to helping the environment by diverting redundant office and school furniture from landfill by providing reused and remanufactured furniture to small business, charities, schools and community groups whilst providing training and real work experience to the unemployed.

What are your furniture needs?

I want some removed I want to buy some

The Commercial Waste Countdown

1 September 2010

Article in FM World by Colin Crooks, CEO, Green-Works

The UK now recycles more than 36 per cent of its municipal waste; impressive when compared to the single digit returns of 15 years ago. This fantastic achievement was driven by government targets which led to a big step up from local authorities.

But these figures only tell half the story; up until now there have been no set commercial waste targets. Business waste has played no part in the success story above.

Well, that’s all about to change. The government has agreed to adopt the same definition of municipal waste as the rest of Europe which includes commercial waste. Growing pressure on the business world is set to completely change the way we think about waste.

What does this mean for facilities managers?

In a nutshell the new definition of waste includes that from businesses and FMs will need to adapt to meet the new requirements. Because commercial waste is more than twice the volume of household waste the government has effectively now doubled its recycling targets.

These figures are not static either. Taking what British businesses did with waste in 1995 as a comparison, towards 2020 we’ll only be allowed to send one third of this biodegradable waste to landfill. Firms will be required to ramp up their paper recycling, start a food composting scheme and make sure their furniture and other wood waste is properly recycled.

At the same time the new EU definition brings with it tougher guidance that goes beyond recycling. It requires that municipal waste (now including a lot of commercial and industrial) is treated in accordance to the waste hierarchy. This now includes the concept of ‘preparing for reuse’.

‘Preparing for reuse’ applies to items that could be reused as originally designed with a certain amount of cleaning or repairs. By 2015, 50 per cent of metal, plastic, wood and paper waste will need to be separately collected for either recycling or preparation for reuse.
How the government will ensure businesses comply with these new requirements is currently under debate. But don’t be fooled into believing that they can rely solely on landfill tax to push firms into recycling. FMs can expect increased guidance from government as efforts are made to hit these targets. Additionally there will be added pressure for companies to be ‘good citizens’ and make their contributions to Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ – but that’s another debate.


Colin Crooks is CEO of Green-works, a Queen’s Award winning environmental social enterprise which diverts waste office furniture from landfill through re-sale, remanufacturing and if necessary by recycling.

< Back

Green-Works Facts

Green-Works is celebrating its 10th birthday this year

We were the first to recognise the scale of the commerical furniutre problem with towards 500,000 tonnes of commercial furniture being dumped in landfill every year by companies

Green-Works has helped over 5,500 charities and organisations providing low cost furniture

We have donated 58 jam packed containers of valauable educational and office furniture across the developing world

Our volunteers programme has save the state over £500K in social benefit

We have 5 proceesing centres across the UK which combined offer over 100,000 sq ft of capacity to deal with unwanted items

Green-Works was awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise - Sustainable Development 2008