For many Care Homes, inefficiencies in waste management, the lack of appropriate staff training, and poorly specified waste contracts lie at the heart of this cost.

The question is, do you know the actual impact of poor waste policy on your bottom line, and what you should be doing to rectify the situation?

The good news is that there is an easy, inexpensive way to address the issue and it’s a solution that will give you all the tools to put things right – a waste audit.

Professionally undertaken by experts in the field, an audit could save your business many thousands of pounds each year, and it could help your business avoid being blindsided by new stringent regulation that’s on the horizon, which could affect your businesses’ right to operate.

By conducting an audit you’ll swiftly identify the cost implications of poor waste management policy, your training requirements, and measures that need to be in place to ensure compliance with regulation. You’ll also generate invaluable intelligence that will enable you to negotiate a better, more cost-effective waste contract.

Alongside future-proofing your business, an audit will help to generate significant year-on-year savings. It’s why it’s the start point of all our waste management contacts with Care Homes.

What’s the cost of failing to be waste compliant?

If your staff don’t understand what waste should go into which waste stream - or worse, they don’t care - you could be paying £650-£850 per tonne for waste collection when you could be paying £150-£300 per tonne?

It’s a stark example, but if you find that your staff put items into orange clinical waste bags, which should go into other more cost-effective waste streams, that’s exactly what it could be costing you.

If you don’t have proper training and a consistent waste management policy in place, nine times out of ten, you’ll find that staff put waste into the closest waste bin to them to save time. If that happens to be the offensive waste bag, that will be costing you £300-£500 per tonne.

Granted, that’s not as bad as heavy offensive waste - such as used incontinent pads - going into clinical waste bags, but it’s still the equivalent of sand through your fingers, and expensive sand at that.

Our audits regularly show that 70% of waste is consistently put in the wrong waste channels within the care home sector. We can help you put that right, saving you valuable cash.

What does an Anenta audit consist of?

Conducting audits properly and consistently will inform your waste management policy development. It will allow you to develop clear statements enabling staff to be trained quickly and easily – which is key in a sector where staff turnover tends to be high. It will also help with the development of protocol, such as guidance and signage of waste streams to avoid costly, unnecessary and avoidable waste cross-contamination.

Your audit will analyse policies, training and compliance with legislation, and includes compositional analysis of waste in a series of spot-checks. This will help to establish your true waste profile, enabling better, more appropriate contracts to be negotiated.

This process involves a visit from a member of our team who undertakes spot checks. If undertaken at multiple sites, our team will assess the consistency of policy across all your sites.

Based on feedback from the audits, we help you to identify and resolve any issues that arise. This is the first step on the path to ensuring that you have a good waste management process in place.

With our help, we’ll enable you to facilitate improvements that are helpful both to the business and to your staff, creating consistency of approach, aiding training that will make your staff’s lives easier, and putting in to place policy that will significantly lower your annual waste bills.

Understanding your waste management responsibilities

Like any other healthcare provider, care homes need to comply with the management of healthcare waste in accordance with the Health Technical Memorandum 0701 (HTM 0701).

Under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, setting out Controlled Waste Regulations and Duty of Care Regulations, there are duties that you as a waste producer need to comply with; a significant one being the pre-acceptance audit.

Effectively, this is a bill of health for your waste contractor, confirming that the waste and quantities of waste produced are managed in accordance with the law and is waste that your contractor is allowed to dispose of. Without this in place, your waste contractor cannot legally accept waste as they would be in breach of their environmental permit.

Undertaking an audit, and subsequently implementing compliant policy and process, is vital in the completion of the pre-acceptance form. We take you through every step of that process to get it right.

More stringent policy on the horizon

The big news on the horizon is that Environment Permit Regulations are undergoing review, and that could mean more stringent rules for the care home sector, enabling the Environment Agency to monitor performance in greater detail, including the ability to track waste from source, all the way through to disposal. If this is put into place, audits will not only be desirable, but essential.

Being ready for this change is vital, and it is where our experts can assist your business with compliance, enabling your business to continue operating seamlessly.

Enabling better contracts

Undertaking an audit will also enable you, as a business, to understand your waste profile more accurately. This is the key to procuring cost-effective and appropriate waste contracts, which have the potential to save your business thousands of pounds each year.

As part of our healthcare waste management service, we work with our clients to not only ensure greater efficiencies from waste service providers, but also better contracts, which we negotiate on your behalf to accurately reflect your waste profile, avoiding ratcheting of pricing or unfair penalty clauses.

Working with Anenta as your independent waste management partner, we deliver an end-to-end waste management service, providing cost-effective solutions combined with transparency to ensure compliant, hassle-free waste solutions including general, recycling, saniwaste, confidential and clinical waste. We police waste services provided by third parties to ensure cost-efficiency and proper practice.

Using technology to save you money

Using our cutting-edge, real-time smart technology, we ensure that your business only pays for waste services used, delivering effective contract management against existing specifications. Where future contracts are concerned, we provide an integrated service which ensures that services are correctly specified, providing customers with transparency and the ability to proactively manage their environmental services.

Using our online contract management platform ‘Vector’ we identify opportunities to streamline your waste services, bringing about the possibility for savings through price negotiations with service providers on your behalf. This includes ensuring that you are not charged for services that you don’t use.

We analyse, examine, check and scrutinise every single billable item to identify any irregularities. If we find overbilling, we dispute this with your waste collector on your behalf, taking away the hassle from the process, ensuring that credit notes are raised where incorrect billing occurs, all before invoices are authorised for payment.

Together, this process gives you greater control alongside valuable annual cost savings. And it all starts with an audit.

To find out how we can help your Care Home save money and comply with waste regulation, please call our team today.