Communicating with staff in the Transport and Storage sector

Estimated reading time: 7 min

Internal communication is an important part of making recycling a success in your workplace. If you completed a waste action plan in Step 2, you’ll find this a useful starting point when it comes to communicating your recycling plans with staff.

It will help you to begin by being clear about:

Why your workplace needs to recycle – go back to Step 1 for all the great reasons why your organisation needs to recycle, including the legislation requiring it.
Who manages waste within your workplace? – for example, who empties the containers at each site or hub? Name individual employees, cleaners and facilities staff.
The location and type of recycling containers and storage facilities – the first section of this step will help with this.
Which external providers manage the waste and recycling collections – and when and how often do collections take place?
How should items be presented for recycling? – for example, clean, dry and loose.

Communicating with your passengers or customers

 As well as your employees, due to the nature of your services it’s likely you’ll need to communicate with your passengers or customers about recycling. For example, at recycling points you install on concourses or platforms. The good news is that customer communications aren’t that different from employee messaging, so you can use the principles we’ve already covered on how to engage your employees to make sure your passengers and customers know:   

What they can recycle
Where the recycling points are located 
Which containers they should use – making sure all containers are clearly labelled!

Communicating with tenants or concessionaires

Many large transport hubs include retail, hospitality and food service outlets catering for passengers’ needs. Inevitably these operations will significantly impact the amounts and types of waste and recyclables produced at transport hubs. This means that tenants or concessionaires have an important role to play in enabling more sustainable customer habits.

You can use concessions contracts or leasing agreements to confirm the obligations on tenants or concessionaires regarding the waste and recycling they produce. You can also stipulate any other expectations you may have, for example requiring them to provide water fountains or refill points to help reduce the amount of waste they and their customers generate.

If your organisation takes responsibility for collecting, disposing of and recycling waste from your tenants or concessionaires, keep up regular communication with them, not just at the point the contract or agreement is signed. Use the advice we covered in step 5 of this guide to monitor your tenants’ recycling performance and how you both can improve it.

Setting your recycling communication aims and objectives

Setting communication aims and objectives will help focus your communications on supporting your wider recycling objectives, as well as enabling you to monitor whether they’ve been achieved. Your objectives could be as follows:

Raise awareness of recycling opportunities in the workplace.
Inform employees of your recycling and waste policy, your organisation’s legal obligations and what they need to support this.
Make it clear how your organisation manages its waste, the benefits of recycling and why you want your employees to recycle.
Educate, inform and motivate employees to recycle – provide instructions and practical support on how to recycle in the workplace and for those working remotely.
Change behaviour – so all employees choose to recycle, making recycling the norm.

An example of an aim and objective might be:

Aim: To encourage employees to start or improve recycling in the workplace

Objective: To raise awareness of what can be recycled across your workplace by installing recycling points, signage and promotional posters at all existing waste points by 31 March 2025.

Planning who you need to tell

It’s essential to communicate your plans effectively to all your employees, including those working remotely, to help them understand how, why, when and where to recycle.

Think about the different types of employees – full-time, part-time, temporary or seasonal staff – and the different roles within your organisation:

Senior management
Managers
Team leaders
Facilities staff/cleaners
Workers with responsibilities for waste collection or segregation
Office staff
Drivers, delivery or distribution workers
Remote workers

Assigning a named employee to take responsibility for communicating your recycling plan with staff members will help make sure everyone is kept informed and doing their bit. Remember that recycling requirements will differ depending on staff roles; for example, facilities staff or cleaners who empty internal recycling bins will have a different focus from drivers, who’ll concentrate more on recycling packaging or food waste they directly produce.

For larger organisations, you may wish to send recycling messages to team leaders to cascade down to individual employees. For example, senior managers will need to brief managers about enforcing your waste and recycling policy, and managers may then need to liaise with waste service providers and directly with the facilities staff/cleaners responsible for sorting and managing waste for collection. Team leaders will need to ensure their staff members follow the recycling policy and reinforce what can be recycled, how and where.

Creating effective communications

Using consistent and complementary messaging across different communication touch points across your organisation – from education emails to signage at recycling points – can help encourage employees, passengers and customers to recycle and change their behaviour.

Using branding to give your recycling communications a consistent look and feel will:

Provide a recognisable identity for your recycling information
Make the messages more recognisable and memorable
Help build credibility and trust

Creating communication touch points across high-traffic areas in the workplace helps employees understand what they can and can’t recycle. To help with this, we’ve created a tried and tested ‘Business of Recycling’ identity that you can use to show your workplace’s support and commitment to recycling. This, combined with the existing national Recycle Now logo, helps reinforce recycling messages both at home and work.

Download these FREE communications resources to get started. They’re designed for you to print and include:

Letterhead/header – to help you promote recycling in the workplace, highlight successes and reinforce the actions you want employees to take.
Email footer – a regular recycling reminder to employees and external audiences.
Instructional posters – in A3, A4 and A5, to show what can and can’t be recycled for each type of waste; these can also double up as bin stickers to ensure materials are collected correctly.

Monitoring the impact of your communications

Once you’ve begun your recycling communications, remember to review them regularly to see how much of an impact they’ve had and spot where there may be room for improvement. Note successes so that you can share them with your team to encourage them; success could be specific actions taken to achieve objectives or consistent, credible presentation of meaningful results.

Above all, identify activities that worked well and those that didn’t, and share learning from this. Review the findings and then list your key recommendations for future communications.