Environmental Consulting in Atlanta

What a waste audit actually involves

An audit is a site visit, not a questionnaire. We walk the building with whoever runs it, open the containers, and follow each material from the point it is generated to the point it leaves the site. Most of what matters is visible in that walk: cardboard flattened into general waste because the bay filled up, scrap metal in a skip charged by weight, confidential paper in an open recycling bin.

The second half is the paperwork. Current invoices, container sizes, collection frequencies and service levels usually tell a story of their own, which is that the arrangement was set up years ago and nobody has looked at it since. Comparing what you are paying to hold and move against what is actually being generated is where most of the easy savings sit.

What comes back is a plain description of your streams, what is currently going to landfill that does not need to, and what changing it would involve in practice for the people who work there.

Who this is for, and what it is not

This service suits businesses with more than one waste stream and more than one person handling it: offices with a mix of paper, cardboard and electronics, industrial sites generating metal alongside packaging, property managers running several buildings to different arrangements, and any operation being asked for diversion figures it cannot currently produce.

It is worth being direct about what it is not. This is not environmental site assessment, contamination testing, soil or groundwater work, or remediation engineering. Those are a different profession and need a different kind of firm. If that is what you are looking for, this page will waste your time and we would rather say so here than after a meeting.

What we do is the operational side: what your business throws away, what that costs, what can be recovered instead, and how the collection has to be arranged so it survives contact with a busy building.

What usually changes

The most common findings are unglamorous. Containers are the wrong size for the volume and the wrong distance from where material is generated, so people use whichever bin is nearest. Signage describes categories nobody recognises. Two or three vendors are collecting different streams from the same yard on different days, which costs more than one arrangement doing all of it.

Separating a stream only pays when the volume justifies the handling, so part of the work is deciding what not to separate. A site producing a small quantity of one material is usually better served by consolidating it with something else than by adding another container and another collection.

Where a business needs numbers for a sustainability report, the programme is designed to produce them as a by-product of how collections are recorded rather than as a separate exercise somebody has to chase at year end.

How consulting connects to collection

Most engagements end with a programme that runs across several of our other services: scrap metal from production or fit-out work, bulk cardboard from goods-in, document shredding for confidential paper, and electronics recycling for the hardware a refresh cycle retires.

Consolidating those under one arrangement is usually the single biggest change an audit produces, because it replaces several vendors, several invoices and several sets of paperwork with one. Where a business operates across the metro area, the same programme runs through our service areas rather than being rebuilt site by site.