Lawrence County Stormwater Management

Stormwater Management, Lawrence County, Ohio

____________

Business Stormwater Pollution Prevention
Businesses play an important role in preventing pollution in stormwater. By using simple, common-sense management and stormwater Best Management Practices (BMPs), you can be a more environmentally-conscious business owner and help improve local water quality. Reducing wastes, reusing supplies, recycling wastes, and donating and exchanging materials can also reduce your business costs and landfill fees. Finally, you can educate your employees to maintain your business pollution prevention practices to keep stormwater clean.

If you are considering construction or development, you can visit the Construction Stormwater Pollution Prevention page.

Reducing Your Wastes
Businesses can often modify their current practices to reduce the amounts of waste generated by changing the design, manufacture, purchase, or use of materials or products.

You can reduce business wastes by:

Decreasing paper use by implementing a formal policy to duplex all draft reports and by making training manuals and personnel information available electronically.
Improving product design to use less material.
Redesigning packaging to eliminate excess material while maintaining strength.
Working with customers to design and implement a packaging return program.
Switching to reusable transport containers.
Purchasing products in bulk.

Reusing Your Supplies
Businesses can reuse products and packaging to prolong the useful life of these materials, thus delaying final disposal or recycling. Reuse is the repair, refurbishing, washing, or simple recovery of worn or used products, appliances, furniture, and building materials for internal reuse.

You can reuse supplies such as:

Corrugated moving boxes.
Office furniture and supplies, such as interoffice envelopes and file folders.
Incoming packaging materials for outgoing shipments.
Durable towels, tablecloths, napkins, dishes, cups, and glasses.

Recycling Your Wastes
Businesses can commit to initiating, expanding, or improving programs to collect recyclables. In some cases, businesses add new materials to an existing program, or they increase program efficiency through employee education.

You can promote recycling in your business by:

Eliminating all paper waste by expanding the recycling program to include all types of paper.
Installing built-in recycling centers and receptacles.
Formally tracking and evaluating internal recycling activities and expanding collection by 1-2 materials each year. Potential materials include corrugated, coated paper, polystyrene, vinyl, and glass.
Investigating external markets for recyclables and expanding collection to include new, marketable materials.

Donating and Exchanging Your Supplies
Businesses can donate products or materials to charities and nonprofits or exchange materials through a commercial materials exchange.

Some items you can consider donating include:

Unwanted supplies to local schools or nonprofit organizations.
Cafeteria food scraps for use as animal feed.
Excess building materials to local low-income housing developers.
Advertising surplus and reusable items through a commercial materials exchange.

Educating Your Employees or Coworkers
Businesses can encourage stormwater pollution prevention through employee education. By teaching your employees or coworkers about techniques for preventing pollution, not only can you improve your business environment but you can actually improve your public relations with your customers and partner organizations by showing customers that you are serious about protecting and improving your community.

You can help employees prevent pollution by:

Including stormwater training in employee orientations.
Introducing employees to the concepts and rules of Best Management Practices (BMPs).
Posting BMPs where employees and customers can see them.

Resources
These links will take you to pages outside of the Lawrence County Stormwater Management website.

EPA WasteWise Waste Prevention

Downtown Building in Lawrence County