The pre-Christmas and festive week trade can make a hospitality business for the next three months – even though it puts the owners and staff under a great deal of stress.
Christmas parties and festive drinks can, however, produce a great deal of glass to be dealt with.
Empty beer, cider, and wine bottles must either be recycled or sent to landfill, and stored safely before they are taken away.
Bars, restaurants, and pubs throw an estimated 200,000 tonnes of glass into landfill every year.
Sending items to landfill is expensive for any business.
Depending on where you are in the UK, there’s an average cost of between £80 and £90 per tonne for landfill waste, including the landfill tax.
Waste prevention charity WRAP says businesses can spend up to 4% of their turnover on dealing with waste.
What does the law say?
Under waste regulations 2011 (England & Wales), businesses have a legal duty to do as much as they can to keep waste to a minimum by:
- Recycling and reusing items
- Recovering items from waste
Waste must also be sorted and stored safely.
Companies must also complete a transfer note for each load of waste which leaves their premises.
Any waste carrier must be registered to deal with their waste, and businesses must check this.
They must also check that no loads are dumped illegally.
Any businesses dealing with their own waste must register was a waste carrier.
Breaching these regulations could land a business a large fine.
The case for glass recycling
Glass is 100% recyclable. It can be reprocessed an endless number of times and retains the same excellent quality it had the first time it was made.
Recycling it helps conserve fossil fuels and reduces carbon emissions – it’s more harmful to the environment to make glass from scratch.
To make new glass, a furnace must use the equivalent energy of burning 250kg of wood. That is reduced when waste glass is used.
It’s estimated recycling waste glass also saves 1.2 tonnes of raw materials for every furnace load.
What can the owners and managers of bars, restaurants, and pubs do?
You can reduce your costs and help save the planet by ensuring your waste is utilised through a commercial recycling company.
Your staff will be busy with the Christmas rush, serving your customers and building your business.
An experienced company, such as Inspire Waste Management, has all the registrations you’ll need to ensure your business stays on the right side of the law.
We also do not send items directly to landfill, helping you reduce costs and reduce your impact on the environment.
It’s a win-win situation!
We provide wheelie bins for glass recycling sized from 240 litres to 1,100 litres. We can also arrange collections daily, weekly, or fortnightly.
That’s perfect for a busy pub or restaurant needing to ensure waste glass bottles are stored safely and dealt with promptly.
