Recently, sustainability manager Marlous van der Veen of the Drenthe drinking water company WMD started working with Milgro. The other day she was standing at the coffee machine when a colleague asked her which container a plastic lid should go in. "Look, awareness, that's profit already!" And there is more.
Van der Veen describes her organization: "We have been making drinking water for Drenthe for more than 85 years and we do it very well. Drinking water is in itself the most sustainable thirst-quencher, so from that perspective we are already doing things in a very responsible way. Thinking about sustainability, and more specifically the circular economy and how we consciously deal with resources, is relatively new within our organization."
WMD already doing well
By which Marlous van der Veen does not mean that nothing is happening in this area. Not at all. Waste is collected well separated at the various locations of the Drenthe water company. The streams are of high quality. Furthermore, WMD works with local processors, so the environmental impact of transport is also low. Call it unconsciously competent. "Just by using our common sense, we already come a long way. For example, we overhaul our water meters ourselves at the end of their useful life, so we almost don't have to buy new ones. That's good, of course, but if we as a company feel that we have a resource responsibility, then we can no longer let these kinds of measures get to us."
Gripon waste
To make WMD consciously competent, and get a grip on waste and resource management, the sustainability manager decided to partner with Milgro. "Milgro is a specialist in providing insight about waste. And that is exactly what we are still lacking."
From separate contracts to one
Marlous van der Veen gives an example. "We all have separate waste contracts, at all our sites. It turns out that we receive 160 different invoices every year, all related to waste." Apart from the fact that this leaves WMD with no insight into the total waste streams and the associated environmental impact, processing those 160 invoices is quite laborious. "Now we bring the waste management all to Milgro. The advantage is that Milgro is an independent party, so it has no interest in dealing with a particular processor. In addition, this reduces the number of invoices per month to one."
"The waste scan gave us insight into all our flows. An eye-opener for WMD," Van der Veen knows.
The waste scan, an eyeopener
Milgro started the cooperation with WMD by performing a waste scan. In it, Milgro investigates what gains can be made by dealing more intelligently with waste. "The waste scan gave us insight into all our flows. An eye-opener for WMD," Van der Veen knows. What Milgro's waste scan further confirmed is that WMD is already performing well. "We have a 90% separation rate. That's high. This is partly because our employees know how to distinguish different types of waste materials." The scan further shows: WMD has a large waste stream of asbestos-cement water pipes being removed from the ground as WMD replaces them with plastic pipes. "That's a difficult stream to recycle, so that's going to be a challenge how we deal with it," he said.
WMD and the CSRD
As sustainability manager, Van der Veen is also in charge of the sustainability section of WMD's annual report. The company faces new European regulations in this area; the Corporate Sustainable Reporting Directive (CSRD). This requires detailed information on sustainability to be published. Also about waste. "Through Milgro's online dashboard we can get that waste data relatively easily above water. I shouldn't have thought about having to request this information in a fragmented way from our various waste processors."
Reducing measures
As stated, the cooperation between Milgro and WMD is fresh. Concrete results of improvement cannot yet be presented by Van der Veen. In the waste scan, Milgro advises to take savings measures to further increase the separation percentage. This should ensure cost savings, even better processing and CO2 reduction. "We will start working on that in the coming months."
Want to know more?
Want to learn more about our approach or go over the possibilities for your organization in a no-obligation discussion? Then make an appointment now with Paula van Hoorik, Circular Economy Officer at Milgro.
