Employees in Statoil are getting steadily better at sorting waste, according to the corporate health, environment and safety (HES) department.
Figures for 1998 show that the proportion of waste sent to recycling in the parent company had doubled since 1996.
Despite a margin of error relating to different methods of collecting data, the positive trend is clear, reports staff engineer Margareta Skog. The recovery factor rose from 50 to 56 per cent last year compared with 1997.
Waste not reused is either incinerated without its energy being recovered, or dumped in a landfill.
"A few years ago, a lot of people shrugged when we tried to get them to start sorting waste," Ms Skog recalls.
"Views today are uniformly positive. Platform manager attitudes are very important in determining how environment-friendly the approach to waste treatment is on their installation."
Waste is sorted into a total of eight categories offshore and on land, she says.
"Our biggest challenge is always to get down the overall volume of refuse through recycling and other measures. Generating waste carries a cost, and the most expensive approach of all is to deliver unsorted waste for deposition in a landfill."
An important target is accordingly to reduce the volume of residual refuse and waste which has to be re-sorted because this job was not done properly the first time.
"We can undoubtedly take this business a bit more seriously," says Ms Skog. "Food scraps containing plastic packaging and paper cups make poor pig feed, for instance."