Whether you’re launching a new recycling system or improving an existing one, measuring your impact means you’ll find out what’s worked well and what could be improved, as well as providing some nice stats that you can show off.

How to write and conduct a survey

Use a survey to collect qualitative information on things such as your audience’s awareness, understanding and satisfaction with the recycling system. You may wish to conduct a survey before you launch the campaign and repeat it a few months after launch, so you can measure any change in people’s answers and campaign impact. We’d recommend incentivising responses with a prize such as the chance to win a voucher to encourage completions.

See templated surveys here.

How to plan and conduct a waste audit

• This is the real deal when it comes to knowing what’s in your bins.

• If you’re improving an existing recycling system, conduct a waste audit before you launch your campaign to understand the current recycling rate and contamination rate. This can also help to inform your communications, such as by focusing messages on the key contaminants in the existing bins.

• Once you’ve launched your campaign, we’d recommend conducting a waste audit once a month for three months, so you can find out what’s going in the bins and change any elements of your campaign where necessary to improve the performance of the bins, such as moving a bin that’s being heavily contaminated, or adding a new sticker to your bins to highlight a key contaminant.

• You might be able to conduct a waste audit in-house by using your cleaning, maintenance, waste or operations teams. Alternatively, there are external companies who can do this for you.

• Here’s a template you can follow for conducting a waste audit.