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NERC Blog

Digital infrastructure for a circular economy

This guest blog is provided by Circular Weekly and written by Lauren Phipps, Director & Senior Analyst, Circular Economy, GreeBiz, originally published online.

To celebrate this week’s announcement of VERGE Infrastructure, the newest component of our annual VERGE conference and expo (online, Oct. 25-28), my fellow GreenBiz analysts and I are dedicating our newsletters to infrastructure across markets in the clean economy. 

A circular economy is often explained as a new system that rethinks the linear approach to resource management — extraction, production, consumption and disposal — instead emphasizing the preservation of value and circulation of materials within a system. Equally important, yet often left out, is the unencumbered flow of information needed…

Influencing Recycling Behaviors

Today's guest blog comes to us from NERC Advisory Member The Recycling Partnership. The original post can be read here.

Recycling is many things. It is both a noun and a verb. To a waste professional it may be the collection and diversion of tons of marketable materials. To community members, recycling is an easy way to waste less and to contribute to the greater good. When asked about recyclables, however, most mistakenly believe that anything with the chasing arrows should go in their bin.

Focus group attendees talk about the dynamics in their household. Most are proud to discuss their recycling, but a few reveal they are confused. And that’s the way it goes, recycling is an ever-moving stream of materials that adds up as a result of billions of decisions and actions,…

John Oliver Is Wrong: Recycling Is All About Individual Responsibility

Today's guest blog, authored by NERC Board Member Chaz Miller, was originally published by Waste 360. The original post can be found here.

You may have seen John Oliver’s March 22 “Last Week Tonight” program about plastics and recycling. The show was a mishmash of fact, opinion and misstatement that painted a desolate picture about plastic recycling in particular and recycling in general. Oliver blamed the plastics industry for convincing us that our failure to recycle is our fault. Instead, he asserted, “the real behavior change has to come from manufacturers themselves”. 

I agree with some of what he is saying. Producers can create better markets by using more recycled content in their products. Producers can make their products more easily recyclable.…

Is EPR the End of Single-Stream Recycling?

This guest blog was originally published in Waste360, and was written by Kate Bailey.  Kate Bailey is the Policy & Research Director at Eco-Cycle, one of the oldest recycling organizations in the U.S., and a founding member of the Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers (AMBR).

I was grabbing coffee at an international zero waste conference a few years ago when three guys from Italy cornered me, eager to talk with an American about our recycling system. They had one big unanswered question: “What is going on with single-stream recycling? What were you thinking?” Like most of Europe, their community programs were source separating materials into 3-5 streams on average and they rattled off all the reasons why they thought this was better than single-stream. I did my best to talk about the convenience of single-stream recycling and how it seemed the best fit for the American culture, but to be honest, none of us felt satisfied with the answers…

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