How planning your recycling and disposing can bring you benefits

It’s one thing for an office to recycle all its paper, cardboard, cans, plastic and glass bottles, electronic waste, light bulbs and food waste.
IT takes a little more planning, however, for a manufacturer to recycle other less common commodity streams like bulk bags, pallets, scrap metal, shrink wrap, specialty plastics and others.
Fairmount Santrol currently has 12 zero waste facilities worldwide. Since 2009, the company has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoided landfill costs at facilities in the U.S.
A starting place
Even when there is a cost to waste reduction services like recycling, composting and waste to energy facilities, it is almost always cheaper than landfilling. In some cases, depending on the regional commodity prices, you can get paid for your commodity streams, especially items like scrap metal and baled cardboard.
Fairmount Santrol saved more than $6 million since 2008 by starting a bulk bag recycling program. The program replaced cardboard boxes with reusable bags that can be repaired or recycled.
While waste makes fewer than 5 percent of all annual greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. according to the Environmental Protection Agency, waste reduction, recycling and composting are an important starting place for many organizations on their sustainability journey.
If you can change behavior regarding simple commodities like aluminum cans and plastic bottles, you can get behavior to change in other areas, too. For example, if an employee begins to recycle cans instead of throwing them in the trash, perhaps that person would also consider simple money-saving energy efficiency measures like shutting down his or her computer at night.
Nature leads the way
Leading companies like Nike, GE, Boeing, Procter & Gamble and Seventh Generation are looking to nature for design inspiration. Five of Janine Benyus’ Nine Laws of Nature include:

  • Nature uses only the energy it needs.
  • Nature curbs excess from within.
  • Nature rewards cooperation.
  • Nature demands local expertize.
  • Nature recycles everything, turning waste into food.

The key is to turn “waste into food” through reducing what you use in the first place, then reusing, repurposing, recycling and composting the rest.  Michael Braungart and William McDonough, authors of “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,” say that all commodities — indeed all materials — belong to either the technical (human made like electronic equipment) or biological (nature made like yard cuttings or food scraps) nutrient cycles. The key is to keep technical and biological nutrients circulating in their respective cycles.
Finally, what can’t be reduced, recycled or composted can be sent to a waste-to-energy facility.
The road to zero waste is an important step on the sustainable development journey. Make the time to look at what you purchase, how you use and could reuse those commodities, and what happens to them after use.