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What Is a Waste Audit?
Looking to better understand your company’s waste streams? This article explains what a waste audit is and how it can benefit your business.Byline: BTB Author
April 21, 2025 / Time to read: 5 minIf you’re looking to
Keep reading to find out how to conduct a waste audit so you can optimize your waste and recycling practices.
What Is a Waste Audit?
A waste audit, also called a waste and recycling audit, is the process of collecting, sorting, weighing and examining your recycling and trash output from a specified time period.
An assessment of your waste streams can help you identify opportunities for improvements. For starters, you’ll be able to better understand which contaminants should stay out of your recycling and which commonly trashed items could be recycled or composted instead.
With a waste audit, you can better understand your business’s:
- Largest diversion opportunities
- Contamination rates
- Financial inefficiencies
- Compliance with regulations and certification standards
- Sustainability and recycling goal progress
5 Important Benefits of Conducting a Waste and Recycling Audit
With the help of a waste audit, you can uncover unnecessary waste generation and find recycling gaps. With that knowledge, you can develop a strategic plan to cut down on waste and improve recycling participation, which can have both operational and environmental benefits.
Determine Your Baseline
Before you can set waste diversion goals, you need to know your starting point. A thorough waste audit will help you better understand what materials make up your business’s waste streams and contamination rates. And if you’re pursuing certain
Monitor Progress
Waste audits are a critical tool in monitoring your progress over time. With an established baseline, you’ll have data to track against.
Optimize Operations
A waste audit can help pinpoint where you can reduce, recycle or reuse materials, which can optimize resources and cut down on costs over time.
Mitigate Risk and Ensure Compliance
One of the most important benefits of a waste audit is that it provides you with helpful information so you can mitigate risk and ensure compliance with waste disposal, recycling and regulated waste laws and requirements.
Encourage Team Participation
By conducting a waste audit, you’ll raise awareness about your company’s waste generation. And as you roll out waste reduction strategies, you’ll help educate your employees on recycling and diversion tactics they can apply not only at work, but also at home.
How to Conduct a Waste Audit
Follow these four steps to complete a DIY waste audit of your business. You’ll start by building a team and wrap up your audit by sharing results company-wide.
Determine Your Team and Timeline
The first step in the waste audit process is to build a team with representatives across your facility or organization. By involving people from different areas of the company, you’ll help get the word out and include different perspectives.
Then, narrow in on a time period for your audit. You’ll want to audit over the course of multiple days to account for variances in waste generation. If you have a custodial team, make sure they’re in the loop and know to securely set aside waste materials to be audited. If waste is bagged, you may also ask the custodial team to label the source department or floor on each bag.
Identify Material Categories
If you want to take your audit a step further than recyclables vs. non-recyclables, you can track different material categories by weight. Standard material categories include cardboard, paper, organic material (food waste) and metals, but the types of waste you’ll want to pay attention to will vary depending on the industry. For instance, healthcare facilities manage medical waste, restaurants typically see more food waste and manufacturers often deal with more packaging.
Gather Your Supplies
Make sure you have the following before you get started:
- Rubber gloves and face masks for safe sorting
- Labels and permanent markers to document the date and location each bag was collected
- Scale to weigh each material category
- Tables to perform the sorting
- Camera to take pictures of the materials
- Paper or computer to record data
- Brooms, shovels or other tools to clean up after the audit
- Water and a canopy if the audit will take place outside
Collect and Sort Through Your Trash and Recycling
Collect all the bags from your trash, recycling and compost containers. Label each with the date, location and waste type (recycling, trash or organics). Weigh each bag and record the weight. With gloves on, remove trash and recyclables from the bags and document anything that shouldn’t be there. For instance, empty cans shouldn’t be in the trash and food containers should be emptied and rinsed before they’re recycled. Once you remove and document any contaminants, reweigh the bags.
Analyze and Share the Results
After you gather your data, make sure to share your findings across your organization. You’ll want to point strong points (like how many pounds of recyclables employees kept out of the trash) and areas for improvement (like which common contaminants should stay out of compost and recycling containers).
What to Expect When You Partner with Republic Services
The waste audit process can be time-consuming and a little complicated when you’re not sure where to start — or what to do after. That’s where we can help! We can help perform a professional waste stream analysis based on your specific material categories and determine the right recycling and waste solutions for you.
We’re also here to help you take it a step further. We can guide you in implementing those solutions in a way that minimizes downtime and makes sure your company stays safe and compliant. And as you scale, we can help you adjust to meet your changing needs.
After the Audit
Remember that a waste audit is just the first step in improving your business’s waste disposal practices. Once you have a benchmark to work from, you can get the ball rolling with clear, defined goals and regular check-in points.
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