4 March 2024
New office waste management systems
Resource use and circularity have been identified as global megatrends and issues from the World Green Building Council, reflecting the importance of waste management.
The climate-related reporting landscape is rapidly evolving both in Australia and globally. Scope 3 emission reporting, which includes carbon emissions from operational waste, is becoming increasingly important for both tenants and landlords.
The primary focus for reducing carbon emissions has typically been through energy and water efficiencies. While Centuria remains committed to improving our performance in these areas, we are now also focussing on actively managing waste streams through BinTracker Premium to reduce waste going to landfill and collecting waste data collection, which will assist with future scope 3 climate-related reporting obligations.
One of the significant challenges with waste management is the education and coordination needed to align cleaning contractors, internal staff and tenants to ensure that all parties are working collaboratively toward the desired outcome of reduced landfill.
In September 2022, Centuria’s Queensland team took the initiative to analyse various solutions to control, recycle or upscale waste matter within office buildings. At the heart of the issue was the limited waste stream options provided for tenants.
The new BinTracker Premium system provides office buildings with four waste streams including general waste, mixed recyclables, paper recyclables and organics (compost). This involved provision of new, separate bins deployed to each tenant in addition to:
- Tenant engagement and training
- New scales at each property to effectively measure and record the waste volume per stream, per tenancy
- Facility manager training and advice (especially regarding the size of central bins and frequency of collections).
- Refining collections per waste stream, which has a cost saving potential as general waste collection is more costly than other streams
- Site assessments for bespoke needs.
- Bintracker Premium mobile app, which provides transparent monitoring of bins and bags with weight data recorded and automatically reported.
Bintracker Premium is now in the process of being implemented across Centuria’s entire Australia office portfolio, consisting of c.70 buildings and almost 1,000 tenants. The new waste management system is being rolled out between February to June 2024.
To date, 37 buildings across Centuria’s office portfolio currently use Bintracker Premium and across these buildings, between 24 May and 29 January 2024, the system has measured:
- a 40.4% recycling rate
- c.300 tonnes redirect from general waste.
The new waste management system has also provided these buildings and their tenants with ongoing cost savings through a revised procurement strategy informed by enhanced data analytics. Most importantly, the thorough and meaningful data shared with tenants assist them with reporting their ESG metrics.
Centuria is now also looking to roll the new waste management system and benefits out across its Industrial platform.
