The Project

Achieving Sustainability

The Problem

The client sought-after a new and innovative program that would generate waste minimisation and achieve the World’s first 100% waste diversion from landfill event – resulting in a mass of environmental and economic benefits.

The Strategy

Incognitus was engaged to deliver a waste Management solution which would enable the event to divert 100% of waste from landfill. To achieve the environmental advantage, a 7 step strategy was implemented by Incognitus, to lead the projects ultimate goal of achieving zero waste to landfill.

• Practice and habit – Not just green
• Reduce, reuse and recycle
• Operate without boundary – Integrated
• Control of all services
• End to end – Environmentally focused
• Strategic, systematic and audited
• Sustainable outcomes – Measured and habitual

The Solution

Incognitus was able to recruit over 4,200 cleaning and housekeeping staff that would deploy 3.2 million man hours of work distributed over 25 Olympic and Paralympic venues including the 19,000 bed Athletes Village in Stratford Olympic park – effectively the largest hotel in the world.

How did Incognitus do it?

The success of the event would be based on a number of key innovations in terms of best practise waste and operational management. By being in total control of the project – through pre planning, strategic event management and post event analysis and identification, Incognitus were able to measure the waste diversion very accurately.

The methodology included;

• Managing waste streams both Back of House (BOH) and Front of House (FOH)
• Conducting random bin audits to limit contamination
• Developing a criteria in which set out those materials considered ‘acceptable’ and ‘not acceptable’ to dispose of
• Onsite composting
• Onsite reduction of recycles

To deliver economic benefits for the event which resulted in

• The cost of sending food scraps to composting – approximately 40 per cent per tonne less than sending to landfill.
• The cost of sending glass for recycling – approximately 75 per cent per tonne less than sending to landfill.
• The cost of sending commingled recyclable waste streams to a sorting facility – approximately 75 per cent per tonne less than sending to landfill.
• Identification of lessons learned for future improvements