NERC Blog

Today's guest blog is authored by Olga Kachook of NERC Advisory Member The Sustainable Packaging Coalition. Last of a three-part series. The original post can be read here.

*This blog is the third and final post in the produce sticker series. You can read the first piece: Produce Stickers: A Small but Mighty Problem, here, and the second: Produce Stickers: Are they the Next Straw, here. 

How might something as small as a produce sticker help divert more food scraps and prevent methane in landfills? One solution involves compostability. In part 2 of this produce sticker series, we explored compostable produce stickers as one possible alternative…

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

At a recent Congressional hearing, two Senators lamented the gap between paper and plastic recycling. After all, the US EPA says paper has a 68 percent recycling rate compared to nine percent for plastics. They wanted to know why.

The answer is fairly simple. Paper and plastics are used to make very different products which are…

Today's guest blog is courtesy of NERC Advisory Member The Recycling Partnership. The original post can be read here.

Some batteries and personal electronics (PEs) can explode or cause fires when discarded in household trash or curbside recycling bins/carts. In fact, more than 1,800 waste and recycling facilities in North America—or roughly 40%—experienced fires annually in recent years, according to California’s Statewide Commission on Recycling Markets and Curbside Recycling.

Today's blog is authored by Mary Ann Remolador, NERC's Assistant Director. The original posting, in Resource Recycling, can be found here.

At the Northeast Recycling Council (NERC) Fall 2020 Conference, a plenary session on racial justice in the recycling industry was featured. This session marked a milestone in NERC’s 33-year history – it was the first time racial issues were discussed at one of our events. While some attendees expressed difficulty with understanding the connection between racial justice and recycling, the majority were extremely appreciative and supportive that NERC had taken the plunge and opened the door on such a complex and challenging topic.

The enthusiasm built by this initial discussion encouraged NERC staff to continue the momentum and plan for doing more about diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) issues. In addition to staff undertaking individual initiatives to better understand and learn more about DE&I, we also started working on ways that we could…

Today's guest blog is authored by Olga Kachook of NERC Advisory Member The Sustainable Packaging Coalition. Second of a three-part series. The original post can be read here.

*This blog is the second in a produce sticker series of three. You can read the first piece: Produce Stickers: A Small but Mighty Problem, here, and the third: Produce Stickers: The Benefits of Going Compostable, here. 

This second post in our produce sticker series explores innovative alternatives.

Why did straws become the poster child for single-use plastic pollution? Perhaps it was because they are unnecessary for most consumers,…

Today's guest blog is authored by Olga Kachook of NERC Advisory Member The Sustainable Packaging Coalition. First of a three-part series. The original post can be read here.

*This blog is the first in a produce sticker series of three. You can read the second piece: Produce Stickers: Are they the Next Straw, here, and the third: Produce Stickers: The Benefits of Going Compostable, here. 

Plastic produce stickers are ubiquitous. Used on a variety of produce, the stickers are helpful at checkout because they carry important information: price look-up codes, or PLU codes.…

Today's guest blog was written by ISRI’s VP of Sustainability, Cheryl T. Coleman. The original post can be read here.

For years, sustainability was synonymous with environment, but the concept of sustainability has evolved to encompass so much more. There was, and remains, a huge emphasis on preserving natural resources, environmental compliance, and safety. Today, though, sustainability is also about having a business culture that:

• Protects the environment;
• Ensures a diverse staff that receive wages that allow them to thrive, and;
• Operates with governing principles starting at the CEO level that include business ethics; cybersecurity; health and safety of employees and surrounding communities; and enterprise risk management including continuous monitoring of all threats and opportunities.

We often see these principles summed up through environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, which are a set of standards for a company’s operations that many investors use…

Today's guest blog is authored by Karen Hagerman of GreenBlue. Its original posting can be found on the Resource Recycling website.

On Aug. 6, Oregon became the second state to sign into law an extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulation for packaging. The Pacific Northwest state joins Maine, bookending the country with legislation that requires producers to take more responsibility for the end-of-life management of the packaging they produce. Though both laws call for the implementation of a producer responsibility program, the two states have differing visions of what that implementation will look like.

Recognizing the differences between the two laws is not straightforward. To help with this, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) recently launched an interactive…

Today's guest blog is authored by Lauren Phipps of GreenBiz. The original posting can be found here.

About once every year, the International Space Station has to alter its course, ever so slightly, to avoid a potentially mission-critical collision with a piece of space trash. These unwanted flying objects — more formally known as orbital debris — are human-made items that no longer serve any useful purpose, both intentionally and unintentionally left to orbit in perpetuity. 

Derelict spacecrafts and satellites, payload carriers, motor effluents, bolts and fragments of paint chips: Orbital debris runs the gamut from more substantial litter — about 23,000 pieces larger than 10 cm — to smaller debris — about 500,000 items between 1 and 10 cm in diameter — to the infinitesimally tiny — over 100 million particles larger than 1 mm. So next time you look up at the night sky and consider your place in the universe, consider that 8,000 metric tons of junk are swirling around above you. 

It’s a tale as old as time. As the…

Today's guest blog is from Lauren Obermeyer, NYSDEC Summer Intern, Division of Materials Management

You may remember a time when you accidentally let a balloon go outside. You were probably sad to see it go, but there’s no dark abyss that it goes into. What goes up, must come down. Balloon releasing is gaining popularity when celebrating or remembering loved ones. What participants don’t realize is that once these balloons are released and you can’t see them anymore, they inevitably deflate and return to Earth. 

An out of sight, out of mind attitude is harmful when it comes to how the environment, as well as others, are affected. Wildlife can ingest these balloons, get tangled in the ribbons, and the balloons can even hit power lines becoming a fire hazard. The plastic balloons also slowly degrade, but never biodegrade once they hit the ground. The macroplastics break down into microplastics that find their way into wildlife, vegetation, and even humans! This is not only a continental wildlife issue, but an aquatic wildlife issue, environmental and human health issue.

How wildlife is affected

Balloons…