NERC Blog

Today's guest blog is authored by Keefe Harrison, CEO of NERC Advisory Member The Recycling Partnership. The original post can be found here.

It’s no secret that we at The Recycling Partnership like data. Our commitment to building and sharing robust analyses with the public and private sectors to drive recycling improvements is core to our mission. The release of our newest report is part of that push to help the world envision a successful U.S. recycling system more clearly. “Paying it Forward – How Investments in Recycling Will Pay Dividends” outlines what it will take to create the healthy system we need, and what that commitment will provide us in return.

With demand for sustainable packaging and corporate ESG pledges on the rise, “Paying It Forward” offers new insight into investments needed for recycling to reach…

Today's guest blog, authored by Suz Okie, is reprinted courtesy of GreenBiz.

“This is the moment to reimagine.” Among the countless details, proposals and impassioned appeals within the

Today's blog celebrates the essential support and input provided by an astounding number of NERC Advisory Members that have joined during the current fiscal year.

More organizations than ever before have signed on as NERC Advisory Members this fiscal year. The generosity and commitment of NERC’s Advisory Members has been significant in helping the organization to be a vigorous and successful one. The presence and participation of a diverse set of members expands the table at which ideas are debated.

Most Benefactors and Sustaining Advisory Members are highlighted in the Member Spotlight section of the NERC website, as well as in NERC’s monthly Email Bulletin. Since July 1, 2020, two companies have joined the ranks of Benefactors:

• Bottle Crusher US

Today's guest blog is authored by Suz Okie of GreenBiz Group. The original post can be found here.

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…

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.

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.…

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…

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

We’re all spending more time at home consuming more products in our homes. Are you also recycling everything you can in your curbside recycling?

Today's guest blog is courtesy of GreenBiz. The original post can be read here.

Consumer interest in the use of recycled materials, so-called recyclates, is on the rise. Indeed, the perceived sustainability of a product or brand is playing an increasingly important role in purchasing decisions, as evidenced by one global marketing research firm predicting sales of sustainable products to reach up to $150 billion in the U.S. by 2021.

Using recycled materials in products is just one way companies can reduce their impact on the environment, and as GreenBiz readers are well aware, this practice has been growing across a surprising breadth of industries.

Patagonia, for example, recently declared that 68 percent of its offerings use recycled materials. Similarly, activewear brand Salomon announced that it would…