Dealing with hazardous waste

Hazardous waste is harmful to the environment and expensive to dispose of. It makes sense to reduce the amount of hazardous waste your business produces.

How to reduce hazardous waste

You can reduce hazardous waste by focusing on three main business areas:

• Maintenance, eg preventing leaks, waste streaming, staff training.
• Technology, eg updating or replacing equipment, applying better controls.
• Production, eg choosing non-hazardous raw materials, altering your products.

Talk to your suppliers for advice on alternative non-hazardous materials and components.

Joining a trade association or networking with similar businesses can be a great way to keep up with new developments.

Examples of reducing hazardous waste

Ways for your business to reduce hazardous waste include:

• choosing non-hazardous or less hazardous materials or components as alternatives to any hazardous materials you currently use
• improving process efficiency to reduce the quantity of materials that you use and the amount of waste you produce
• improving quality control procedures to reduce the number of defective products that you have to throw away
• minimising equipment cleaning - better working practices can reduce both the frequency and the extent of cleaning, reducing the amount of potentially contaminating effluents that you produce
• recovering used materials that are discarded - some of these may be reused on site, others can be sent off site for recycling, treatment or recovery
• changing the design of your products or processes to eliminate the use of hazardous materials
• separating your waste to prevent contamination

Support for reducing hazardous waste

Invest NI offers support to reduce waste in your business and to improve your process efficiency.