Winners of the 2015 Awards for Excellence in Recycling and Waste Management include telecoms giant O2 for phone recycling, a collection crew from Kensington & Chelsea and a recycling officer from South Bucks District Council. The Zero Waste Platinum Award went to the New York Bakery Co for its waste reduction and minimisation work.
At the Awards held last month and organised by letsrecycle.com those present heard from Sophie Thomas who is director of circular economy at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and founder of The Great Recovery. She told the audience of her experience in working to improve sustainability in product design and her work to ‘build bridges’ between designers and recyclers.
She said: “Designers need to build teams with resource management at the heart. We need strong cross-sector collaboration, you have a lot of insight that my sector never ever sees and we need that information to see where we can change our designs.”
The Awards presenter for the day was Eamonn Holmes, who said he realised what a tough job the industry faced in pushing up recycling rates.
The UK’s largest maker of croissants and bagels, New York Bakery Co, won the Zero Waste Platinum Award (which is the top prize in the Zero Waste Awards scheme) for its work in reduction of food waste and overall waste minimisation, working with contractor Biffa.
The Awards were jointly sponsored by WasteCare. Peter Hunt, Chairman of the WasteCare Group, praised the winners for their success in moving away from landfill and finding positive uses for waste materials. (Pictured are: TV presenter and awards host Eamonn Holmes, Peter Hunt of Wastecare with representatives from New York Bakery and Biffa.)
