How can an SME reduce waste and save money?
James: When we're looking at that lens of saving money, waste is so, so important. So I alluded to the waste hierarchy earlier. Now I'm going to test you quickly, if you just take us through what those are.
And I'd really like you to give us some examples from your time in industry where you've seen a radical impact by addressing waste.
David: Okay, so the basic principles on waste are:
Reduce.
It’s the first thing you do. You can reduce the amount of waste you've got, and you're winning already.
Reuse it.
So if you've got something that you can reuse multiple times, whether it be a pallet or a plastic bottle or whatever it is, then fantastic, reuse it. And then if you can't, then you have to try and find a source to Recycle it.
Now, interestingly, I've done some work for Viola, who is actually the biggest waste management company, I think in the world, certainly in Europe. They’ve got a £45 billion pound turnover. They've got a university in Paris. They said come talk to us at our university, to this massive global forum. I stood there in front of 200 people talking to them about waste. Absolutely remarkable.
But, you know, they turn over 61 million tonnes of waste a year, and they recycle 77% of that. So that's a good measure to say actually, with materials that we use that we're chucking away, how much could you get to be reused.
So if you're literally just chucking away, you know, 80% or 90% of your waste, there's a massive opportunity, it's quite easy to move from that to recycle 50% of stuff. The other 50% is a bit harder, but that's where really trying to find the right partners and the right strategy is really important.
But if you haven't started, get started on just looking at how much waste - do a waste audit, work out what you've got.
Often when people talk about waste, they talk about waste materials, and that's what we've just done here.
The other way of reducing waste is thinking about things like Inventory and SKUs.
James: SKUs being stock keeping units, if I'm right?
David: Yes SKUs being stock keeping units, so basically how many different types of product you have.
So I had a great example of a company that did greenhouses. And they had 3000 different varieties of greenhouses. And actually, therefore, they had loads of bespoke stock items that go into building a greenhouse.
Now, that causes a load of inventory.
And if you've got a load of inventory, then you do tend to have a lot of waste as well as having a load of stuff on the balance sheet.
So there's a real question with inventory of ‘well do I need this many items?
Can I just have one version of that rather than three?
Do I need four different sizes or will two do?
That can really reduce your wastage.