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Waste reduction tips for a small business that produces significant waste in essential industries

3 Waste Reduction Tips for a Small Business in Essential Industries

Small businesses that operate in essential industries such as construction, manufacturing, production, fabrication, and other similar industries know how quickly waste can be produced in the course of daily activity.

While it may seem like a challenging task to reduce waste accumulation at your place of business or job site, we have assembled these waste reduction tips for a small business to help you implement an effective process to produce less waste.

Taking simple and effective steps to minimize the accrual of waste will help your company operate more efficiently, reduce the need for re-work, and protect the community.

Waste Reduction Tips for Essential Service Providers

One of the benefits of operating a small business is that you can easily communicate this information and quickly implement these tips. Your regularly-scheduled production or safety meeting is the ideal place to have open discussions with employees about how to reduce waste at the job site.

1. Enhance Production Communication

The first way to reduce waste is to take proactive steps to increase the efficiency of production at the job site.

One recommendation is to increase communication efforts with workers who will be performing the work. This could be outlining additional steps in the process, providing more details of what is being required, or conveying other important information to help workers be more productive. 

You know what would work best for your company; the key is taking action to enhance communication.

– The result is reducing the amount of extra materials required for the job and minimizing the risk of re-work that leads to even more materials used to complete the job. Striving for first-time-right can help your small business reduce waste production.

2. Review Quality of Tools and Equipment

The quality of tools and equipment available to be used at the job site can greatly impact the efficiency of work.

We recommend that managers and supervisors routinely review the condition of tools and equipment and make recommendations for when they should be cleaned, maintained, updated, and optimized for performance.

Another recommendation is to provide training on how to use the tools and equipment. If workers are not properly trained or re-trained on how to use these elements, they could produce unnecessary waste from re-doing the work. Have those conversations during safety and training meetings with your team to ensure that everyone is onboard with proper use.

– When workers have access to quality tools and equipment and they are trained on how to use these essential elements, they will not require as many materials to complete each job. This will effectively reduce waste.

3. Consider Adopting Lean Principles for Waste Reduction

Many small businesses in essential industries have adopted Lean principles to help reduce the amount of waste they reduce.

When applied to essential industries, Lean focuses on eliminating waste that occurs in production. These areas include:

  • Overproduction (could be caused by not understanding the customer order)
  • Overprocessing (could be caused by performing more work than required for the job)
  • Defects (could be caused by poor materials that leads to scrap or re-work)

– We recommend taking steps to evaluate each of these areas. Then, see if there is room for improvement to help your business produce less waste through a Lean production approach.

How Can Gainsborough Waste Support Waste Reduction?

Our company provides roll-off dumpsters, front-load dumpsters, and access to our Dump Site to help small businesses in Houston keep waste under control.

  • Roll-off dumpsters are mobilized to your location and serviced on a regular schedule to manage waste.
  • Front-load dumpsters can be placed at your place of business and serviced on a routine basis.
  • Our Dump Site is available for individuals from your business to bring waste for removal and processing.

Reducing waste accumulation is also important to our company because we care about the environmental impact of waste on our city and local communities.

We are committed to preserving the environment through our waste services. To keep Houston green, we follow sustainable waste practices that support essential service providers, especially small businesses in essential industries that need a reliable partner to help out.

– We hope that the information we provided is useful for helping reduce waste at your location. To find out more about how we can partner with you for waste reduction and management, contact us today.
We are available through our website contact form, by phone at 713-999-6178, or by email at [email protected].