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Recycling leads to a cleaner facility
10th of November 2026 Article by Lotte Printz
A new waste sorting system at the Norwegian School of Economics helps students, staff and cleaners alike. With a cleaner environment as an added bonus. This from ECJ’s Lotte Printz.
Driven by heightened environmental awareness and concerns, citizens increasingly expect sustainable and proper waste management and recycling. This goes for the staff and students at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) as well, although it may not necessarily have shown in their everyday waste disposal behaviour. This made NHH’s facility management team take action to find alternatives for the academic institution’s waste bin system on its premises.
With 3,700 students and 500 staff attending and moving around a campus area covering three buildings and 33,000 square metres on a daily basis, a lot of waste is produced and needs to be handled. And it became obvious to NHH that the current solutions weren’t adequate for proper source separation and efficient management on-site.
Reduce waste bins
A count revealed that there were 900 waste bins around the whole campus which did not facilitate waste separation and sorting. It was clear from this count the number of waste bins needed to be reduced and that they had to come up with a more ‘easy to follow’ system that made students and staff more inclined to ‘make good decisions’ when getting rid of their rubbish around campus.
Academic staff at NHH were already doing research on how to make people separate waste and gently push them into changing their behaviour. This in-house knowledge combined with input from external company consultants dealing with waste sorting systems resulted in a model where the original 900 waste bins were to be replaced with 70 waste sorting units - or waste separation stations as they are called locally - placed strategically around the campus.
“Our buildings are often at full capacity so it’s important that the waste separation stations are recognisable and easy to spot in order to make the ‘users’ look up,” says Eivind Drange, head of facility management at NHH, speaking to Norwegian cleaning industry magazine, Renholdsnytt.
Other advantages
A back panel was created for this purpose, showing the labels or icons for the separate waste groups: plastic bottles and metal packaging like cans, paper, food waste and residual waste. Each unit consists of four containers.
And the newly implemented waste sorting system has proven most beneficial not only for improving waste separation habits at NHH.
“This is highly propitious for making people separate waste, but there are other advantages too. Among other things, our cleaning team save considerable time when collecting rubbish. Time they can now spend on cleaning instead. As a result, our buildings are cleaner,” Eivind Drange points out.
The waste separation units also go well with the facilities. Visually, they give a far tidier look as Eivind Drange puts it. And by keeping the waste in more central, yet fewer locations, the logistics have been simplified.
Everyday ‘users’ are also pleased with the outcome. Not only have they embraced the new ways of separating waste, which has boosted recycling, they have also acknowledged that these waste separation stations have become an integral part of the campus.
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