Often, the best collaborations happen organically, and that’s exactly how Fitzsimons And Co and Albury Business Connect came together to help each other grow and improve their processes.

Fitzsimons And Co is all about proactive sustainability – helping businesses find opportunities to improve, or implement, their internal sustainability processes to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

Challenges we faced

Inspired to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ – as the saying goes – Albury Business Connect GM, Lisa Hastie, asked Nick to come in for a waste audit of the ABC office. Only having a general waste bin meant the typical office waste produced on a weekly basis – paper, soft plastics, lunch and snack scraps – all went into the same bin.

Nick came for an audit of both the office and BusinessHub, helping us categorise the types of waste we produce and identify easy to implement ways to separate items and dispose of them correctly.

How Fitzsimons And Co helped

With Nick’s help, we now have separate receptacles for general waste, food waste, soft plastics, and mixed recycling. Since our volumes of waste are relatively low, everyone takes turns taking the recycling and green waste home to dispose of in the green- and yellow-lidded bins.

Outcomes

For us, this demonstrates how easy it is to find solutions for everyday problems that on the surface can seem too big to handle, but just need a bit of creative thinking.

“Nick’s passion for his work is infectious. The team were all eager to do their part to get involved and feel proud knowing they are playing a part to make a difference. It’s progress over perfection and these small changes all add up,” said Lisa.

For Nick, this has a been a great opportunity to refine his process and develop his confidence in working with all types and sizes of businesses. It also demonstrates how his business model can work across various industries.

“It’s allowed me to practice in a service-based business and enables the Albury Business Connect team to do their best. What I’ve taken from it is a refining of the process and confidence in the fact that smaller businesses that don’t handle food or produce lots of products can still make a big difference.”

Fitzsimons And Co also offers a course for businesses to create a sustainability champion – someone who will drive these changes within each business. The course provides the foundations a sustainability champion needs to get started and enables ongoing self-directed learning to keep up with any changing regulations or options for recycling in their local area.

“Because every council area has different capabilities for their recycling and waste management, we really encourage self-directed learning. If an organisation can give their sustainability champion an hour a week to dedicate time to stay on top of things, answer questions and find solutions, good things will happen,” said Nick.

Ready to do your own waste audit? Get in touch with Nick today.