Environmental Leadership Awards

Outstanding Member - Good Point Recycling

Outstanding Organization - Helpsy

Outstanding Municipality - Town of Woodbury

Outstanding Program - Chittenden Solid Waste District

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Outstanding Member - Housatonic Resources Recovery Authority

Outstanding Organization - Inner City Green team

Outstanding Government - Prince George's County

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Vanguard Renewables - For the impact it has had on organics recycling. Through its network of hauling partners, anaerobic digesters, food waste partners, family farms and Organics Recycling Facilities it has enabled hundreds of businesses across New England to recycle over 600,000 tons of organic waste into a valuable, renewable fuel source for local communities.    

Lifetime Achievement Award – Terri Goldberg, Executive Director, NEWMOA, for her outstanding and leadership contributions to recycling and materials management, as well as for her significant collaboration with NERC.  

Advisory Member Award – Waste Management for recycling food waste at its CORe® facilities and generating green energy 

Public Sector Award – Maryland Green Purchasing Committee for its Conserving Resources and Promoting Recycled Content through its state procurement program 

Private Sector Award -  Green Kelly Boards for developing a process for recycling aseptic cartons into a usable product 

Special Recognition – Earthworm Recycling in recognition of more than 50 years of being a self-supporting non-profit dedicated to the promotion of recycling 

Advisory Member Award – American Chemistry Council

Public Sector Award – Massachusetts Port Authority

Private Sector Award -  Urban Mining Northeast

Advisory Member Award – The Delaware River & Bay Authority’s Regional Environmental Leadership and Enhanced Recycling Program received NERC’s advisory member award. The Delaware River & Bay Authority is a bistate governmental agency that operates the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the Cape May-Lewes Ferry System and five regional airports. Recently, the authority partnered with Waste Management to provide recycling containers to each employee and rolled out new and enhanced recycling practices across all of its facilities, NERC reports in a news release on the award. 

It also expanded its environmentally preferable purchasing practices, including furnishing Lewes, the Delaware ferry, with 100 percent recycled plastic products, such as Adirondack chairs and picnic tables. It also hosted three World Environmental Days in Delaware and New Jersey to promote waste reduction, recycling and avoiding marine pollution.

Public Sector Award – The Recycling Contamination Reduction Campaign in Danvers, Massachusetts, received NERC’s public sector award. The town of Danvers worked with its hauler, JRM Hauling and Recycling, Peabody, Massachusetts, to retrain its curbside recycling residents about what to recycle. 

The town updated its outreach and educational materials and created a “Danvers DPW Recycling Guide” to educate residents on proper recycling, NERC reports in a news release on the award. It also updated its website with these details, sent out a press release and ran a social media campaign surrounding its recycling guide. 

In July, JRM stickered and left contaminated recycling loads at the curb—Danvers Public Works employees followed JRM’s recycling truck and left the “Danvers DPW Recycling Guide” with the resident, NERC reports. The sticker program identified 1,200 residences that had contaminated recycling bins. Numbers dropped significantly after the first week and had decreased by 90 percent at month’s end. There were only seven repeat violations in July.

Private Sector Award -  The Armstrong Ceilings Recycling Program received NERC’s private sector award. The Armstrong Ceilings Recycling Program is one of the longest running recycling programs of its kind in the ceilings industry. Since its inception in 1998, the closed-loop program, which takes back discarded ceiling panels from renovation and demolition projects and upcycles them into new ceiling panels, has diverted more than 200 million square feet of used ceiling materials away from landfills, NERC reports in a news release on the award. 

In addition, the Ceilings Recycling Program has saved more than 1 million tons of virgin raw materials and prevented 100,000 tons of construction waste from being deposited at landfills. In the 11-state NERC region, it has diverted more than 40 million square feet of used ceiling materials, saving 220,000 tons of virgin raw materials and preventing 20,000 tons of construction waste disposal. 

State Project - Connecticut’s multimedia What’s IN, What’s OUT Campaign, a project of the RecycleCT Foundation, seeks to increase awareness of Connecticut’s recycling rules. Contributing to the development and success of this campaign were material recovery faculties (MRFs) in Connecticut, RecycleCT board members, the firms of Decker and ReCollect and the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection recycling staff that kept everyone working together, NERC says. The What’s IN, What’s Out Campaign, has been engaging residents through digital and social media, generating more than 7.4 million impressions, 70,000 website visits, 104,000 RecycleCT Wizard searches and 1.9 million video views. Commissioner Robert Klee of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection accepted the award on behalf of the campaign.

Private Sector Initiative - PaintCare, a program of the American Coatings Association, Washington, is a paint manufacturer stewardship program that provides end-of-life management of leftover paint. In the NERC region, PaintCare has programs in Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont. These programs conserve leftover latex and oil-based paint by offering the public convenient drop-off locations, diverting the paint from landfills and improper disposal. To date, PaintCare has processed more than 1.2 million gallons of paint in Connecticut, more than 326,000 gallons in Maine, in excess of 305,000 gallons in Rhode Island and more than 438,000 gallons in Vermont, NERC says. PaintCare provides more than 360 drop-off locations in the region, including paint stores, transfer stations and hazardous waste programs.

Municipal Program - The village of Scarsdale, New York, launched a municipal food scrap recycling program in January 2017, becoming the first municipality in Westchester County to offer such a program. Th program has been “remarkably successful,” NERC says, and has quickly expanded to 10 additional municipalities in Westchester County and the lower Hudson Valley region area of New York. Since the Scarsdale program began, almost 336,000 pounds of food scraps have been recycled into compost. Weekly collections currently exceed 4 tons and continue to increase as more households register to participate. Within the first 18 months, more than 1,000 households registered, representing 18 percent of all Scarsdale households, according to NERC, which adds that Scarsdale’s food scrap recycling program is a model for other communities.