ESTATES AND FACILITIES MANAGEMENT
Recycling and waste review identifies value in principal waste streams
Improving environmental performance requires an organisation to challenge itself, and there cannot be many organisations more complex than a large acute NHS Trust in which to do this. The North Bristol NHS Trust was looking to both improve its environmental performance and reduce costs, and was prepared to allow unrestricted access to achieve this goal. Sitemark was engaged to undertake a recycling and waste benchmarking review across the Trust’s main site, Southmead Hospital in Bristol, and associated satellite sites. Given the wide range of wastes produced, the approach taken was to follow a ‘bottom-up’ audit trail, ‘from bin to boardroom’. This involved observations of disposal operations and waste movements, inspection of internal and external waste containers, and auditing of everything from invoicing through to performance reporting.
The benchmarking review identified that percentages of material being sent to non- recycling end-of-life solutions could be diverted to recycling solutions without too many changes to internal portering processes. The benchmarking review process also confirmed that there were opportunities to turn some streams into an asset for the Trust. Savings and rebates were identified over and above the cost of the process, and these can now be invested back into other sustainability led projects.
The Trust’s senior Facilities manager, Jeanette Baker, said: “Through our engagement with Sitemark we have had an independent review of our recycling processes, and we now fully understand where we have strong best practice processes and solutions in place. We have also been able to start looking at areas where we can improve our recycling performance and consider cost reduction programmes.”
analysis will detail any areas where a facility is failing to reach best-in-class practice and why. The independent benchmarker is vital here, because it can provide a clear and objective view. Specification and a schedule of development can be provided, including staff engagement programmes, cost improvement programmes, training plans, schedules for the repatriation of outsourced services, or tender processes for better outsourcing. This ensures that clients have a clear means of significant improvement. Finally, the organisation can be certified both as having received an independent benchmark, and that its facilities reach a best-in-class standard.
68 Health Estate Journal May 2020
The North Bristol NHS Trust is one of the UK’s largest hospital Trusts, and operates an acute hospital at Southmead (pictured), and six ancillary sites across Bristol providing specialist healthcare services.
Current challenges
There are a number of current demands on the healthcare services, and businesses as a whole, in addition to providing ever better value. There has long been a question as to whether ‘insourcing’ or ‘outsourcing’ is a better option, and indeed public services have been under increasing pressure to bring services back ‘in house’ in the last couple of years. It is therefore more important than ever to understand the implications of choosing between outsourced or in-house services. Benchmarking traditionally finds that in- house services provide a better performance on average, but outsourced specialists are more likely to reach the
best-in-class rank. Of course, this can vary, depending on a multitude of factors – including the industry and the size of the business. Whether an organisation decides to insource or outsource, benchmarking can provide assurance that the services are reaching the highest standard.
Environmental sustainability Environmental sustainability is being built into many services, and becoming a core aspect of many organisational corporate social responsibility policies. Achieving it demands that organisations account for sustainability in every aspect of their practice. In waste management, this
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