A little while ago I was at the green guardian awards ceremony in Croydon and I was really impressed with one of the groups that were nominated for an award. The Croydon Freecycle group didn’t win the award for Green Group of the year but they had a serious hand in helping other people win nominations and awards. They also highlight the ways in which business and community can work together. At my company, First Impressions, we are very proud of our Environmental performance and we consider ourselves to be right at the cutting edge of environmental development. One key way that we have managed this is through our recycling programme. Our current recycling rate sits at about 85%.

Recycling at this rate is very difficult to sustain. Paper, glass, plastics and metals are all relatively easy to recycle and as a company we can put measures into place to ensure that our staff abide by these principles. However that alone will never get to the kind of high recycling rates that we have been achieving. The reason is that at some time every company has to replace something that cannot easily be recycled – whether its phone handsets that we don’t need any more , desks, pictures that we’ve grown tired of, old ring binders that we no longer need or bigger things like old monitors or PC’s. All of these things can be reused by someone else and all of them are difficult to find a recycling company that will take them as they are, and not break them down. After all reuse comes well above recycle on the waste hierarchy for a reason.

That is when it pays to engage with your local community. At first impressions we dispose of the things that can be reused by engaging with our local free-cycle group. Freecycle is a brilliant group that connects those that want to dispose of goods with those that want them. This has many business benefits but three key ones; firstly, there is the obvious cost savings of not paying someone to recycle your goods; secondly, you get to boost your environmental performance; finally, you get a chance to directly engage with people who have direct experience of your commitment to the environment and who become your ambassadors to their friends and the companies they work for.

But that’s really just the beginning, by engaging with community recycling at this level you are helping to develop a green economy and investing in a group of activists that are going to spread a culture of green consumption and thinking.

To find out more please go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ydon-Freecycle/