Waste Management

This year:

Waste Management/Reduction

Telecom supports the practice of 'Reduce, Reuse and Recycle'. Our broader strategy for reducing waste to landfill includes recycling and minimisation in three areas - office waste and electronic waste and resource use efficiency.

Office Waste

We reduce office waste by introducing simple but effective practices like printing only when necessary, double-sided printing and photocopying and sending documents electronically.

We reuse office resources such as reusable envelopes made from 60% recycled paper and 40% new paper from sustainable plantations.

Our office recycling programme has been operating since 2003 and focuses on separating waste (including paper, glass, tins and plastic) for recycling with the residue going to local landfills. The programme initially started in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch and was extended in early 2008 to include more offices.

To date the programme has been very successful with significant proportions of our waste stream being recycled.

• Our annual waste is gradually declining (Figure 1 below) despite growth in staff numbers since the recycling programme started
• With over half of waste being recycled the annual monthly residue waste per person has declined from about 11 kg/person to just over 3 kg/person (Figure 2 below)
• Since 2003 we have diverted about 1,170 tonnes of waste from being deposited in landfills

This Year...

Following the expansion of our recycling to more offices and overall we are very pleased with the improvements from last year.

• An increase in the overall amount of waste recycled (48 to 53%)
• Increasing the number of sites which have recycling

However, sadly this year also saw a small backward step in some areas.

• Our highest annual total waste (recycling plus residue) which has been attributed to high number of office relocations (cleaning out old documents etc)
• A small overall increase from in residue waste per person (3.11 to 3.26 kg), which is something we are currently investigating

Some key highlights are:

• Diverting 274 tonnes from being deposited in landfills in New Zealand
• We have settled on a good office coverage of 93-94% of staff
• Maintaining over 50% recycling for the year

Figure 3 below shows the monthly progress of our recycling in comparison to last year and clearly shows the results of expanding our recycling programme over the last quarter of the year.

Our Results

Fig. 1: Waste Levels

Fig. 2: Proportion of Waste Recycled

Fig. 3: Monthly Waste Per Person