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NERC Blog

Circular Economy: The Best Business Model

This guest blog was originally published on the U.S. Green Chamber of Commerce website, and was written by Darwin Daniel, Managing Director, Inversa Consulting LLC.

In my 20 years of work experience, I have never felt so passionate and committed to promoting sustainable development. I started my professional career under the premise of making things more sustainable and more profitable. As a businessman, this business model has allowed me to understand that doing the right thing generates even more profitability for a company. And as a citizen, contributing to the benefit of society and the environment creates far greater personal satisfaction.

As the economy expands, the demand for more raw materials required for the production of goods has increased. Economies are growing so rapidly that we have to examine how wise it is to increase the rate at which we extract more raw materials and generate waste. This current unsustainable model that consists of “take-make-use-dispose”…

The Challenge of Markets - the supply of recyclables is larger than demand

This guest blog is provided by Michael Alexander, Recycle Away Systems & Solutions.

Markets, markets, markets," the recycling buzzword for the 1990s, has become all too familiar to those responsible for moving materials through the recycling process. Why are markets so vital to the success of recycling? How do they behave under the current recycling fervor? What forces lie behind their development?

Traditionally, a market is created when the available supply of a product is matched by a corresponding demand. Usually, supply and demand follow each other closely, as markets evolve over time. In the rush to recycle, however, the demand for recyclable material has not always kept pace with burgeoning supplies. While state and local governments have proved effective in implementing programs to recover materials, they have had less success in finding markets for them.

Several factors contribute to this problem. The lag time between the availability of large quantities…

EPA Releases Findings From Crumb Rubber Study

This guest blog is courtesy of Scrap Tire News.

Long-awaited research study differentiates between what is present in the recycled tire crumb from what people may actually be exposed to from recycled tire crumb.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the Synthetic Turf Field Recycled Tire Crumb Rubber Characterization Research Final Report: Part 1 -Tire Crumb Rubber Characterization, July 25, 2019.

The report is part of the Federal Research Action Plan (FRAP) on Recycled Tire Crumb Used on Playing Fields and Playgrounds, a multi-agency effort that includes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (CDC/ASTDR), and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)performing research that seeks to improve the understanding of potential health effects of recreational exposures to recycled tires. The EPA and CDC are studying the chemical characteristics of recycled tire materials and the exposures on athletic fields. The CPSC…

Food companies should know what’s in the packaging. Here’s why

This guest blog is provided by the Environmental Defense Fund,

EDF & Business blogs, written by Tom Neltner and Michelle Mauthe Harvey

Recently, we recommended a series of steps that companies can take to address EDF’s top-ten list of chemicals of concern in the food supply, including setting new packaging specifications, verifying compliance, and tracking progress. Perhaps surprisingly, one action you haven’t seen us recommend – until now – is one of the key tenets of EDF’s Five Pillars of Safer Food Leadership: supply chain transparency, in this case into chemical additives to both raw material and final paper and plastic packaging.

The reason why is simple—the packaging supply chain can be especially opaque, and we strive to minimize frustrations when we make suggestions. People may make commitments about what’s not in their packaging, but they often seem unwilling or unable to share what is being used. As companies react to concerns about sustainability and recyclability of packaging, the opaqueness is a framework that can lead to unnecessary scrambling when questions…

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