Plastic Cup Recycling

1jim

Hi all,

have managed to get work to consider recycling the plastic cups that people use for water in the waiting room, have found http://www.save-a-cup.co.uk/ but does anyone know of anyone else who does this, maybe cheaper?? I work in the NHS and all costs have to be accounted for as there is no budget for recycling and I would have to be pretty persuasive to get my managers to divert money for this (just looking at it I think we would have to pay £50 a year fee to get a health and safety certificate, then buy rolls of bags at £7ish for 20 bags in addition to the collection bins...)if it was my money/company I would have no problem with this but as its public money need to look at the best deal
thanks
Jim

flutterbyuk25

Does your local council run plastic recycling? if so then could you come to an arrangement with them to collect/recycle them for you? I'm working on that at moment where I work (also govt agency). If I have any success or other ideas I'll let you know.

x

1jim

hi,
that would be great if you could let me know, local council dont recycle plastics, they also wont recycle trade waste....only household waste

ScoobieGirl

Unfortunatly not! I looked quite hard, as I couldn't understand why one of our suppliers were paying us to take away our waste plastic wrapping, but we were having to pay Save-a-Cup to take the cups away. Those bags are stupidly expensive compared with a heavy duty bin bag.

On investigation it does appears that Save-a-Cup is a non profit organisation, if not a cheap one!. We are looking at getting the other company to take them, but it wouldn't be cost effective if they weren't coming to our site anyway

1jim

Its very difficult, it has taken over a year for my manager to get to the point to consider recycling but am not sure if she will pay for it :-( . The sad thing is that she has a budget for waste and this is costed by the container....which we just about fill every week, we would still pay the same if we took out the plastic cups so I guess from here point of view she would be worse off if we recycled.... need to come up with some great ideas on how good we would look within the local nhs for doing this????

ScoobieGirl

It is really hard trying to justify recycling to management when it means an increased cost.

One of the main problems with recycling cups (so the company we use for our other plastic recycling said) is the amount of liquid etc in with them. If you could reduce this, you might have better luck with someone taking them away for free. We are looking at using drainpipes for collecting them, turning them upside down to drain before sending them off. (Density of packing was also a consideration, another reason for the drainpipes)