Edinburgh Leisure finds the fun in waste sorting

Edinburgh Leisure is the charity responsible for managing Edinburgh Council’s leisure facilities. This includes 141 sports pitches, 17 gyms, 12 pools and six golf courses.

Parul Baghel manages a small energy and sustainability team of two: Jill Johnstone and Megan Ballantyne, who share the job of engaging staff across their 32 sites.

One way they do this is through a Green Team. It is made up of volunteer ‘green champions’ from each site who oversee the implementation of sustainability initiatives.

For several years, tackling waste has been an area of focus for Edinburgh Leisure:

Stopped supplying single-use plastic pool shoes in 2019

Removed disposable cups from the water fountains (visitors can request them from reception or purchase Edinburgh Leisure reusable water bottles)

Phasing out disposable cutlery at their cafes, after successfully introducing reusable cutlery at one location

Secured funding in 2024, with the help of Edinburgh Solar Co-op, to install HotBins at their cafés to enable onsite composting

Despite these improvements, Edinburgh Leisure still struggled with waste segregation. In 2023, Biffa charged them for 78 wasted trips – instances where recycling couldn’t be collected due to contamination.

So, the Green Team decided to double down. The sustainability officers carried out one-to-one meetings with each green champion to understand the knowledge gaps around waste segregation and discuss ideas for tackling it.

From July to December 2023, they rolled out voluntary waste reduction training at each site, organising games and field trips to make the sessions engaging and interactive.

‘Eye-opening’ recycling centre visit

In 2023, the energy and sustainability team took the green champions to visit the local Biffa recycling centre, arranged through their contract manager.

Parul described the visit as “eye-opening.”

She says: “For us, disposing of something incorrectly doesn’t have a big effect. But having seen somebody hand picking things due to cross-contamination because the whole batch could not be used, it made me really think about the consequences of what we throw away and more motivated to recycle things properly.”

To organise a waste centre visit, speak to your waste contractor or check your local council website. West Lothian Council, for example, have a comprehensive list of sites in their area.

Edinburgh Leisure's waste-sorting game

You will need:

Ping-pong balls or similar

Marker pens

15 minutes (consider adding onto a team meeting)

Labelled waste bins for each waste stream. E.g. landfill, paper and plastic, glass, food waste. If you're not sure which categories you need, confirm with your business waste contractor.

A list of most thrown away items. Briefly audit your waste bins if you don’t have this information.

How to play:

Label the ping-pong balls with the items most frequently found in your company bins. Make sure to have enough balls that each player has a set.

Throw! Players have between 2 and 5 minutes (you choose the time limit) to throw the balls into the labelled waste bucket they think is correct for each item.

Time is up! Sort through each waste stream in turn and discuss the results as a group. Which items were correctly sorted, which ones weren’t and why?

Optional extra: Use different coloured ping pong balls for different teams and score the most correct throws. Repeat the game at the end of the team meeting (and as often as you like!) to track improvement.

The impact

In 2023, Edinburgh Leisure was charged for 78 wasted trips due to contamination. In 2024, following the training programme, that number dropped to 48, an encouraging sign that their staff are now segregating waste properly!

They received lots of positive feedback. Staff said that they learned a lot of new information – in particular “what you can and cannot recycle”.

Top tips from Edinburgh Leisure:

Test your recycling assumptions. Blue paper roll and receipts were of our biggest contaminators. They cannot be recycled. Try a quick online search or get in touch with Climate Springboard for advice!

Ask your waste provider if they provide resources. Biffa have some great pre-made posters, guides and toolkits.

Start with quick wins. Do all staff members have easy access to a recycling bin? Is everything unnecessarily going to landfill because you just need an extra bin in an office?

Edinburgh Leisure sustainability policy