NERC Blog

Today's Guest Blog is authored by NERC board member Chaz Miller. The original post can be found here.

Who doesn’t like the idea of zero waste? After all, waste is a cost, not an asset. Worse yet, if improperly handled, it can be an environmental burden. That makes eliminating waste an entirely reasonable idea. Yet, as my experience on a county task force showed, getting to zero waste is easier said than done.

For a good chunk of the last two years, I was a member of the Montgomery County, Md., Aiming for Zero Waste Task Force. The County Executive appointed our group of seven in 2018 to advise the Department of Environmental Protection on revisions to the solid waste plan. Montgomery County is immediately north of Washington, D.C. We are Maryland’s largest county with more than one million residents. The county manages recycling, composting,…

Today's guest blog is authored by NERC Board member Chaz Miller. The original posting can be located here.

I love to hike. I often go to Rock Creek Park in the District or the Northwest Branch Trail in Silver Spring and enjoy an hour or two on the trails. In the past, I’ve always seen some litter, usually water bottles and other odds and ends. Since the pandemic began I’ve seen a surge in those bottles along with masks and gloves used to protect from the virus. Littering may be bad behavior and illegal in the parks, but that doesn’t seem to prevent it from happening.

I thought about that when I read the latest news story about another Congressional hearing on recycling. How to cure recycling is a hot topic on the Hill these days. We are told at these hearings that recycling is “broken”.  However, if we just adopt this policy or that policy or maybe this whole long list of…

Today's guest blog was written by Angelina Peone, the Recycling Coordinator at Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency in Kingston New York. It originally appeared in the US Composting Council's Soil Builders Blog, and can be found here.

In 2017, a nonprofit organization of leading scientists and researchers called Project Drawdown published a comprehensive report of key climate solutions and options to achieve ‘drawdown’ – the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing, and start to steadily decline. The organization published an update on their initial assessments in the 2020 Drawdown Review, a 91-page report that ranks the critical actions needed to curb global warming temperatures under 2˚C – which is widely regarded as the scientific consensus of a global warming tipping point where climate change impacts could devastate the planet. The researchers lay out two ambitions scenarios that could achieve their emission reduction goals by mid-century if all solutions are applied…

Since 2000, Vermont Food Education Every Day (VT FEED) has worked with schools throughout the state, “to grow robust farm to school programs, acting as a catalyst for rebuilding healthy food systems, and cultivating links between classrooms, cafeterias, communities, and local farms.” A significant part of the nonprofit’s work has been the publication of farm to school resources, which with the publication of Connecting Classrooms, Cafeterias, Communities: A Guide to Building Integrated Farm to School Programs now number nine.

The 130-page guide, which is a free download from VT FEED’s website, “is an updated compilation of earlier resources and offers new approaches and tools to help your school community successfully grow your farm to school program,” it states. The guide is part of a national wave of farm to school programs: according to the USDA Farm to School Census,…

Today's Guest Blog is from the Composting Association of Vermont. It was originally published here.

In this first post, I address a question about siting a system, that has come up a number of times over the last few years as we’ve worked to promote community composting and it’s also a question often asked by backyard composters: “Does a compost tumbler and/or bin need to be situated in the full sun?”

It’s a common misconception that compost systems need to be in sunny spots in order to achieve hot composting. Some claim that this is why many bins and tumblers are made of dark-colored materials (think black Soil Saver bins) – in order to absorb the sun’s radiation. While this has some merit, since the sun does heat up the tumbler or bin contents, it’s not where the heat comes from when we talk about hot composting.

In fact, as with everything in well-functioning compost systems, you can thank the microbes for heating things up! Heat is a byproduct of the of the decomposition process.

In…

With COVID-19 upon us, single-use gloves are in use more than ever.  The headlines that quickly followed the virus outbreak in the US have often focused on used gloves strewn on the ground, in parks, and in parking lots.  For those working in materials management, this did not come as a surprise, but instead piqued our interest to find a way to manage the discarded gloves.   

Two companies that are facilitating the collection and recycling of disposal/single-use gloves are TerraCycle® and Kimberly-Clark Professional.  Both companies implement a discarded glove collection program and forward the materials to processors for making into a feedstock for manufacturers.  The manufacturers are using the recycled-content feedstock for making new products.

TerraCycle’s Disposable Gloves Zero Waste Box Program began in 2014 when TerraCycle’s Zero Waste Box division was launched.  “Since then it's quickly become one of the highest volume waste streams we divert from landfills—80 tons of used gloves collected.” reports Sophia Berrios, Global Marketing & E-Commerce Manager, Zero Waste…

This week's guest blog is courtesy of the It's All You campaign of The Recycling Partnership. The original posting can be found here.

Why should I recycle? It’s a question that we’ve all asked ourselves. The Recycling Partnership wants you to know that the answer is easy. According to the Partnership’s Chief Community Strategy Officer Cody Marshall, “Every time we recycle, we reduce pollution and conserve resources. But recycling does more than that. Recyclables have potential. When you recycle something, you’re actually putting material back into the supply chain.” It’s simple, easy, and something that we can all do from the comfort of our homes and offices.

What actually happens to the materials placed into recycling bins and carts?

The current recycling system…

Today's guest blog is by Brian Hawkinson, Executive Director, Recovered Fiber, American Forest & Paper Association.

Over the last decade, the U.S. paper industry has achieved a consistently high recycling rate, meeting or exceeding 63 percent since 2009—a rate that’s nearly doubled since 1990, when the industry first set a paper recycling goal. Recently, AF&PA announced that the 2019 paper recycling rate was 66.2 percent. The rate represents a slight decrease from the 2018 rate, 68.1 percent, largely due to a reduction in U.S. recovered paper exports to China, but is still an increase from the 2017 recycling rate of 65.9 percent. The recycling rate for old corrugated containers (OCC) was 92.0 percent in 2019 and the three-year average OCC recycling rate is 92.3 percent.

Recovered fiber is essential to produce paper and packaging products. In 2019, more than 31 million tons of recovered fiber was consumed by U.S. paper and paperboard manufacturers. Nationwide, more than a third of the paper industry’s total fiber requirements are met using recovered material.

For…

Today's guest blog is authored by NERC Board Member Chaz Miller. The original posting can be found here.

At the end of January, I spoke on recycling markets at the Connecticut Recyclers Coalition Annual Conference. I never uttered the word “pandemic”. So much for my predictive abilities.

In spite of that, they asked me to do a webinar at the end of this month on the pandemic’s impact on recycling markets. Much of its impact on the industry is well known. Residential trash and recyclables are up, commercial trash and recyclables are down. Because businesses, as a whole, generate more of both, overall waste and recycling generation are down. Due to social distancing and other requirements, MRF workers are being separated and line speed has slowed. Worker shortages have been…

Today's guest blog was authored by Alex Freid of the Post Landfill Action Network (PLAN). The original post can be found here.

Dining on College Campuses During the COVID-19 Pandemic

About a month ago, we announced that we were going to host a digital discussion for campus sustainability staff called “Zero Waste Strategic Planning During COVID-19”. We framed the conversation as a space to come together to discuss the following questions:

• “How do we maintain momentum towards zero waste goals while campuses aren’t active?”
• “How can we use this time while students aren’t physically on campus to map out long-term strategies for our programs and projects when we get back?”

In the sign-up form, we asked staff to share what their projects currently look like while they are working from home, and what concerns they have about ongoing zero waste efforts. In total, over 250 campus staff signed up, causing us to schedule…