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Circularity has become a core element of washroom management, with the emphasis on renewal say the experts at Kimberly-Clark Professional
With rising sustainability expectations and growing legislative pressures, facilities managers are evaluating how waste is handled across their estates. Washrooms, once viewed as simple hygiene spaces, are becoming key to driving measurable impact. Through smart design, recovery programmes and supplier partnerships, circularity in the washroom is emerging as a practical and scalable strategy to reduce emissions, meet wider environmental goals, and lower costs. As organisations work toward net zero, and new policies like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) tighten the screws. The outdated take-make-dispose model is not just inefficient, it’s unsustainable.
Today, circular economy thinking is transforming how facilities are managed. Nowhere is this shift more tangible, or more overdue, than in the washroom. Often overlooked, these spaces are high-footfall, high-consumption, and high-waste. Yet until recently, their potential as drivers of sustainability has gone largely untapped.
THE WASHROOM: A NEW FRONTIER FOR CIRCULAR FM
For years, the FM industry focused its circularity efforts on big-ticket areas like energy use and packaging. But the humble washroom is now under the spotlight, offering quick wins and deep impact when circular principles are applied at scale. Paper towels and dispensers are essential consumables, but also persistent contributors to waste volumes. The opportunity lies in designing washrooms around the principles of reduction, reuse, and recovery.
What’s driving this change is not just a sense of environmental duty; it’s also about reputation, compliance, and resilience. Clients want visible sustainability, legislators want accountability, and with more FM contracts including environmental, social and governance (ESG) KPIs, washroom circularity has become a competitive differentiator.
Suppliers like Kimberly-Clark Professional are pioneering new ways to make hygiene spaces more sustainable. Its ReNew programme, which launched in 2025, builds on the legacy of its RightCycle programme offering end-to-end recycling for hard-to-handle items like used paper towels and dispensers. It even accepts competitor products.
It is a simple model: used products are collected, processed, and turned into raw materials for new items. In the UK, for instance, paper towels collected through the programme are sent to Kimberly-Clark’s mill in Koblenz, Germany, which is on track to move to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2029. Here, they are turned into recycled tissue products, enabling full-circle resource recovery, this has resulted in more than 35 tonnes of post-consumer paper towel waste being recycled in 2024 alone. That’s the equivalent of saving nearly 800 trees and eliminating 5.58 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
CUTTING WASTE WITHOUT COMPROMISING HYGIENE
Of course, washrooms are about more than waste, they’re critical to hygiene, safety and user satisfaction. Circularity initiatives must meet these standards, or exceed them, to be viable. Solutions like controlled dispensing systems of hand towels offer dual benefits. By regulating usage to one sheet per pull, they minimise unnecessary consumption while reducing refill frequency and maintenance time. The result? Lower costs, better service efficiency, and reduced environmental impact. In a major roll-out across nine hospitals, traditional paper systems were replaced with controlled dispensing units. The results were dramatic: 23 million fewer metres of paper used, £394,603 saved, and over 1.1 million fewer units requiring refilling in just six months.
As corporate ESG reporting grows more complex and scrutinised, clear metrics matter. The ReNew programme provides customers with regular reports tracking waste diversion, emissions savings, and progress against zero waste goals. These aren’t just stats for internal dashboards; they’re evidence points for audits, stakeholder updates, and public disclosures. For FM leaders this means instead of chasing fragmented data across suppliers and contractors, they gain a single, streamlined source of data, making sustainability demonstrable.
It also reduces risk. With regulatory frameworks evolving rapidly across the UK and Europe, such as the expansion of EPR schemes and incoming plastic bans, having traceable data and circular systems in place protects businesses from future non-compliance.
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of circularity in the washroom is its scalability. From a single office to a nationwide hospital network, the principles hold. What starts with a switch in dispensers or towel collection can evolve into an enterprise-wide waste recovery programme. And the incentives are stacking up. Clients are demanding greener service models. Governments are tightening regulations. And frontline staff are more engaged when they see their actions translating into environmental impact.
With growing interest in plastic recovery, compostable materials, and alternative waste streams, the infrastructure built for washroom circularity is opening doors for broader applications across the built environment.
The washroom may have been a sustainability blind spot. But today, it’s a proving ground for what modern FM can achieve. Through smart design, strong partnerships, and data-backed programmes, facilities teams can turn hygiene waste from a problem into a platform for progress. Circularity is no longer an ambition, it’s a blueprint for smarter, leaner, and greener FM operations. In the race to net zero, every stream matters, and in facilities management, the journey to circularity might just begin in the washroom.
