About us
The role of the Waste and Recycling Office and the services it provides.
Background
With almost 8,000 staff and over 28,000 students involved in a wide range of research and teaching activities, the University of Edinburgh is one of the larger producers of waste in Edinburgh and produces a variety of waste and recycling types.
We are however doing a good job in continuing to reduce our impact on this front. In 2010-11, we only sent around 740 tonnes of waste to landfill or incinerator and recycled over 1600 tonnes (that's over 67.5% recycling).
The Waste and Recycling Team
The Waste & Recycling Team is part of Estates Operations within Estates and Buildings.
We are responsible for the management of all University waste and recycling. We do this by procuring and managing centralised contracts for our General waste and recycling streams and for high risk or hazardous streams (e.g. Hazardous Waste, Healthcare & ABP waste, WEEE waste).
What is waste management?
Waste management is the collection, transport, processing*, recycling or disposal, and monitoring of ALL waste materials. These can involve solid, liquid, gaseous or radioactive substances.
It also includes providing guidance, advice and support to the University Community to ensure that legislation is complied with. See attached "Buyer's Guide" for some of the aspects of Supplier management that we cover.
The University Court is committed to continuous improvement of waste management practices and a reduction in the proportion of waste sent to landfill. In order to do this targets are set and revised as appropriate by SEAG-Operations.
Our current targets are to increase recycling by 3% annually, to reduce waste to landfill by 3% annually and to send zero biodegradable waste to landfill by 2020.
* We hand over the processing part to contractors we have procured. However if we segregate waste on site that is part of the processing procedure.
Staff list
List of Waste and recycling office staff and their contact details.
Contact us
Main contact details of the Waste and Recycling office, and how to find us.
This article was published on Nov 9, 2011