Motivating employees in taking action to reduce energy, water and waste, can provide a big boost for an organisation’s cost reduction efforts. ‘Your Workplace Without Waste’ is Courtauld 2025’s employee engagement programme to help food and drink organisations to inspire everyone across their business to throw away less food and packaging.
Through a series of fun, interactive activities, employees can understand the financial and environmental impacts of workplace waste, recognise and measure waste, including its financial cost, and generate solutions to reduce waste and put them into practice.
From kick-starting a campaign, through to maintaining momentum and measuring outcomes, food and drink sector managers can leverage the ‘Your Workplace Without Waste’ modules to engage employees in finding solutions. The resource pack even includes a waste ‘Treasure Hunt’. All of this can lead to significant waste and cost reductions, as well as reducing the environmental impact of operations.
Employee engagement in action
Courtauld 2025 signatory, Puffin Produce, delivered ‘Your Workplace Without Waste’ to staff, and developed new solutions including the diversion of food that would otherwise have gone to animal feed, to redistribution for human consumption instead.
Puffin’s staff really took to the ‘Your Workplace Without Waste’ approach and it’s given us a great kick-start for our new focus on waste. The feedback we’re getting is that ‘Your Workplace Without Waste’ motivates people and helps them estimate quantities of waste and identify our waste hotspots. We’ve taken a number of actions to tackle waste already and we are planning to roll out ‘Your Workplace Without Waste’ more extensively across the company as part of a big focus on waste prevention, and to enable us to meet the Courtauld Commitment 2025 targets which we’ve signed up to.
Mererid Jones, Sustainability Executive, Puffin Produce