Industrial Waste Services

Industrial Waste Audits

Packaging Reuse audits industrial sites and routinely finds them paying hazardous rates on material that is not hazardous, and disposal rates on material that could be recycled. Most waste audits are done by a salesperson with a clipboard counting bins. Ours are led by the environmental chemist who would be classifying the waste anyway, because on a production site the expensive mistakes are classification mistakes, not container mistakes.

Send us twelve months of transfer notes and a recent invoice, and we will tell you where the money is going. Call 0161 848 0976 or get in touch.

What does a waste audit cover?

A waste audit is a structured look at what your site actually throws away: what each stream is, how much there is, where it goes and what it costs. It is an evidence-gathering exercise, not an inspection you can fail, and a useful one answers four questions and surfaces the same findings again and again:

What and how many: the type of waste the site produces and how many separate streams.
How much: each stream by weight over a representative period.
Where and under what code: where each one currently goes and how it is classified.
What the alternative costs: what it would take to handle each stream differently.

We repeatedly find non-hazardous material consigned as hazardous, recyclable material going to general waste for want of a container, one contaminated stream reclassifying a whole load, and containers disposed of when they could be reused. None of those need a new supplier to fix; they need somebody to look. Send us your notes, and we will tell you what your streams actually are.

How we carry out a waste audit

We run the audit in five stages, because each depends on the last. We start with a desk review of your last twelve months of transfer and consignment notes, invoices and any analysis, which usually shows where the tonnage and the money sit before anyone visits. We walk the site following the material rather than the bins, through the production areas, the waste compound, the effluent plant and the yard. Our chemist characterises anything whose description is incomplete or whose code looks doubtful, which is the part a clipboard audit skips and the part that changes classifications. We quantify each stream against a representative period with its current route, code and cost, then write a report and action plan: the types and quantities of waste, what they cost now, and what could change through reclassification, segregation, container changes, different routes and reuse. You get a written report either way, and it is fine for the answer to be that your current arrangement is sound.

Call 0161 848 0976 to arrange a waste audit of your site.

Waste audit questions

Can we run a waste audit ourselves?

You can run a waste audit yourself, and for the volume streams it is worth doing: weighing what leaves the site over a fortnight and checking it against your invoices will find the obvious problems. Where an internal audit tends to stop is classification, because deciding whether a stream is hazardous means assessing substances and concentrations against hazard thresholds rather than reading the label.

Will a waste audit reduce our disposal costs?

A waste audit often reduces disposal costs, though not always, and the savings come from reclassification, better segregation and better routes rather than from a discount. If your streams are already well described and well separated, the audit confirms that and the recommendation is to leave things alone. It is a piece of work in its own right, so plenty of sites keep their existing arrangement afterwards and get the report either way.

Does a waste audit help our recycling rate?

A waste audit helps your recycling rate mainly by making the figure defensible. Sites often report a rate that slips energy recovery in as recycling, which will not survive a question from an auditor, so measuring each stream and recording where it genuinely went gives you a number you can stand behind, even where it is lower than the one you were using.

What do you need from us to start?

To start a waste audit we need less than most sites expect: twelve months of transfer and consignment notes, a recent invoice or two, a site plan if you have one, and any analysis or safety data sheets for the awkward streams. If your records are incomplete, that is itself a finding rather than a blocker, because incomplete paperwork is one of the commonest compliance risks we find.

What happens after the audit?

After the audit you get the report and a set of options, each with the cost attached. Where it recommends a change of route or container, our industrial waste management service can put it in place, and where classification is the problem, the fix is on the documentation side. You are not obliged to use us for any of it, and audits that end with a site fixing three things itself are a normal outcome.

Talk to us about auditing your site

If you run several waste contracts and still cannot say where each stream ended up or what it costs, a waste audit is the place to start. Send us twelve months of notes and an invoice, and we will show you the shape of the problem before anyone proposes anything. Call 0161 848 0976 or get in touch with Packaging Reuse.