The MAX-R BLOG
Best practices
Logistics • Recycling Process • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
Parallel Access
In my experience one of the most successful tools to achieving your goals is a methodology called parallel access.
Read More
Compost • Operations • Sustainability
Where are the Farmers?
If you want to tackle the issue of composting or food waste, reach out to farmers and include them in your discussions. You might be amazed at how much more successful your efforts are.
Read More
Recycling Topics • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
Evolving Ton
What do you buy? Is it the same thing you bought 10 years ago? 20 years ago? Is it packaged the same way? Do you buy it from the same place? Chances are, the answer is no.
Read More
Education • Recycling Process • Recycling Topics
Is America's Recycling Industry Really in the "Dumps"?
Recycling is a manufacturing process. The recyclable materials we collect are commodities and like any commodities there are ebbs and flows in supply and demand.
Read More
Metrics • Operations • Planning
Reducing Food Waste
Who or what are you feeding with your dining dollars? Perhaps focusing on the answer to that question will help you meet your foodservice sustainability goals.
Read More
Education • Metrics • Sustainability
How Do Your Sustainability Efforts Contribute To Student Recruitment?
Imagine you are a wide-eyed 18-year-old presented with one of the first major decisions of your life. What makes you choose one campus over another?
Read More
Education • Logistics • Recycling Topics
Understanding "Outthrows" To Avoid Recycling Confusion
Have your recycling markets gotten more restrictive in recent months? Are you struggling to explain the new recycling rules to the public? The answer may be "outthrows".
Read More
Landfill • Logistics • Recycling Process
What's Next For Your Recycling Program?
Has your recycling program been slashed by the national sword? Not sure what happened? For those of you who have only known a marketplace in which Chinese recyclers were a huge presence, hopefully a little history and perspective can help you parry the impacts of the national sword and defend critical parts of your recycling program.
Read More
Logistics • Operations • Waste and Recycling
Considerations for Contracting New Waste & Recycling Services
When you contract for services, an important question is who owns your waste and recycling infrastructure? Do you expect your contractor to provide that infrastructure? Or do you own that infrastructure and provide it to your contractor to use during the term of the contract? It can become an important consideration.
Read More
Operations • Recycling Process • Waste and Recycling
Piecing Together an Effective Recycling System
A recycling program is made up of many different pieces. As you grow your program, one of the biggest challenges is making sure those pieces fit together into an effective system.
Read More
Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Campus Move Out
The end of the school year is coming. With it, if you are a residential campus, comes one of the biggest waste and recycling events of the year: student move out. To help make your move out a diversion success story, here are five tips, along with links to prior blog posts, that can give you more in-depth information
Read More
The Benchmarking Map
How am I doing? At some point, you have to ask yourself that question. Maybe it’s to plot a strategic direction. Maybe it is part of a benefit-cost analysis. Maybe it is to validate the efforts of those who have participated in or supported your recycling program. But, whatever the reason, at some point you have to ask yourself how you are doing. And like any question, the answer often depends on your perspective.
Read More
Logistics • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Planning for Summer Construction Projects
If you’re a campus planner or facilities administrator, summertime dreaming often means that you are scrambling to put the finishing touches on summer construction plans. This is often the final home stretch of a particular project that has been in process for years.
Read More
Logistics • Recycling Topics • Sustainability
Waste Awareness Campaigns
The consumer psyche is complex and challenging to fully comprehend. Marketers work tirelessly to figure out ways to get people to change their spend patterns, all the while influencing people’s tastes and preferences. It’s no different when it comes to getting people to understand the magnitude of their impacts around waste.
Read More
Operations • Planning • Waste and Recycling
The Road to Achieving Zero Waste at your Next Event
Working towards and achieving a zero waste event may seem like a daunting task. Yes, it is not an easy feat to divert all of your waste away from landfill; however there are several common strategies to working towards a zero waste goal at your next event. It is necessary to remember it is the steps along your journey, not your end product that will make your goal have a lasting effect and a legacy for future generations.
Read More
Logistics • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
ADA and Its Impact on Recycling
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that sometimes I don’t see things quite like other people in my field (if you are a longtime colleague of mine, you have just finished thinking “that’s an understatement” after reading the preceding sentence). One area where I often see things a little differently regards recycling regulations.
Read More
Planning • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
Successful Waste Management Takes Commitment, Not Cash
Recycling has come a long way since the mid 80’s when the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” slogan became the official chant of the green movement.
Read More
Best practices • Recycling Process • Waste and Recycling
Athletic Field Recycling
It’s that time of year. The ball fields are ready. The players are ready. Is your recycling program?
Read More
Planning • Recycling Topics • Sustainability
Defining Waste & Recycling Program Success
As the sustainable-materials-management industry has grown since the 1980s, we have added a lot of goals, regulations and reports. And in those, we use a lot of terms. But what do we mean when we use those terms? Too often, what makes a recycling program a rousing success or a spectacular failure comes down not to efforts, investments, programs, but merely definitions.
Read More
Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Back to School
If you are a college or university, depending on when classes start, you are either already knee deep in student move-in issues or about to be. If you are a new reader, below are some previously-written blog posts to help you navigate some of the recycling and sustainability issues you will encounter as the students return. And if you are a returning reader, hopefully one of these posts will remind you of something that you said you wanted to try this year.
Read More
Best practices • Waste and Recycling
Can Branded Bins Augment Your CSR Efforts
Branding is generally an attempt to associate your product or company with certain ideas or images to clearly differentiate it from others in the field. At its most basic, it is little different than its roots, in which ranchers would mark their animals so that they could be easily identified when roaming or grazing together, a practice that dates back to the ancient Egyptians or beyond. Eventually, that same concept was used in commerce so that when similar products from different manufacturers were shipped or sold together, each product could be clearly identified.
Read More
Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Making the Most of Student Move Out
If you manage recycling programs at a residential campus, student move out is one of the most frantic periods of the year. If you’re new to the process, it can be overwhelming. But, regardless of whether you are still planning for move out, staring at the piles of discarded stuff accumulating as students are moving out, or have already missed your window of opportunity and are merely leaving notes for things to do better next year, focusing on the six items below will help.
Read More
Education • Waste and Recycling
Restricted Access
For recycling to work, you have to segregate the materials that you want to recycle from those that you don’t. If you didn’t have a restrictive lid you would typically rely on a label on the front of your bin to identify that stream. But for bin labels to work most effectively, you need a clear line of sight and adequate time to read the label.
Read More
Planning • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
Recycling Program Budget
Successfully growing and sustaining recycling programs can sometimes depend on something as simple as where you budget recycling expenses. As budgets are being set for next fiscal year, now is the time to think about what you want accomplish next year, how you want to fund it, and perhaps most importantly, where you want to fund it.
Read More
Education • Planning • Recycling Process
Education in Residence Halls, Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I proposed that the most effective way to deliver this education is a hybrid system that uses the existing access of the resident assistants (RAs) and bolsters it with a smaller group of expert and enthusiastic enviro-liaisons.
Read More
Education • Planning • Recycling Process
Education in Residence Halls, Part 1
Residence halls are home for any resident students that you have on campus for the 8+ months per year that they live there. That means that at some point you are going to need to do recycling education in the residence halls. The question is how.
Read More
Planning • Recycling Process • Waste and Recycling
Improve Cost Effectiveness of Your Recycling Program, Part 2
A while back, I wrote a couple of blog posts about funding. They focused primarily on outside funding. But rather than just looking for outside funding sources, have you looked to see whether there are ways to enhance the revenues that you receive for your recyclables to get you the extra funding that you need? What items on your wish list could you fund if you took advantage of those opportunities? Do you have filet mignon that you are selling as ground beef? Have you looked at that before you ask someone else for money? By weight, most of the traditional recyclables on a college campus are high grade printing and writing papers.
Read More
Planning • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
Improve Cost Effectiveness of Your Recycling Program, Part 1
Ah, that magical moment when you lift up the couch cushions to clean and find money that had fallen between the cushions. It’s never enough for big expenses like the rent or mortgage, but sometimes it can be enough to get something you didn’t think you had enough money for, especially if you save it up over time. A while back, I wrote a couple of blog posts about funding. They focused primarily on outside funding. But rather than just looking for outside funding sources, are there opportunities to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of your existing program? If you take advantage of those opportunities, would it be like finding extra money in your couch cushions, money that you didn’t realize you had? What items on your wish list could you fund if you took advantage of those opportunities?
Read More
When the Coast is Clear
Whether or not you officially close on Labor Day, attendance drops dramatically when kids return to school and the family vacations come to an end. However, as you prepare for your offseason, the end of the season brings some recycling and solid waste decisions.
Read More
Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
Sustainability at Student Orientation
Orientation for new college & university students is almost here. Whether your orientation is a weekend or an entire week, it can be an important but tricky opportunity. At many schools you have every member of the incoming class concentrated into a handful of events or even a single event. If you can get into that event, or events, it provides a tremendous opportunity to access and convey information to the entire incoming student body.
Read More
Best practices • Operations • Waste and Recycling
What You Buy & What You Throw Away
Somewhere along the line we have become distracted by aggregated waste audits and national studies. In the process we too often miss a simple correlation.
Read More
Logistics • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
Riding the Market
Several months ago, I wrote a blog entry called “Knowing what you’ve got” to try to help people understand that recyclables are commodities and to encourage people to recognize the various grades of material they might have. However, in re-reading that post, I wanted to return to that topic to help people understand how to use that information to market their recyclables.
Read More
Best practices • Logistics • Waste and Recycling
Window of Opportunity
Sometimes timing is everything. Or if not everything, timing can sometimes have a significant impact on your program’s success.
Read More
Education • Planning • Recycling Process
Know Your Campus, Part 3
For part 3 of this “Know Your Campus” series, I am going to focus on location. Some folks in real estate are fond of suggesting that location is everything. I wouldn’t go that far, but location can have a profound impact on how you manage your recycling and sustainability programs. In terms of location, I would suggest there are 3 main categories of schools: Urban campuses, Semi-urban/suburban campuses, Rural campuses
Read More
Education • Operations • Planning
Know Your Campus, Part 2
For this part 2, I am focusing on some of the differences between public and private schools. Every school has a complicated mix of funding sources, a lot of which I am going to gloss over (consider this the intro 100-level version). For those of you who are recent students making the transition to coordinator or who are folks new to working with schools, I am hoping this overview helps.
Read More
Education • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
Student Move Out Day, Part 4
Student move out day is coming (sooner than you realize). When the students are moving out, where do you want them to put their unwanted stuff? How do they know where to go and where to throw away/recycle/re-purpose that stuff?
Read More
Best practices • Operations • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Different Than Home
When you set up a recycling program, one struggle that you often encounter is that some people think they already know everything about recycling.
Read More
Recycling Process • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
The New Math, Part 5
A tremendous amount of the energy that we consume and greenhouse gasses that we emit worldwide comes from making “stuff.”
Read More
Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Student Move Out Day, Part 3
“I can’t believe what those kids leave behind.” If you do enough end-of-the-year student move outs, you hear that statement a lot. If you’re making that statement to note the number of opportunities that there are to recover valuable materials, and how much of a shame it is to see that stuff end up in a landfill, then we’re on the same page.
Read More
Recycling Process • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
The New Math, Part 4
There is a new math of greenhouse gas accounting by which some people are viewing and evaluating everything...
Read More
Recycling Process • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
The New Math, Part 3
I would argue that any climate action plan that omits stuff - the stuff we buy, the stuff we use, the stuff we throw away - is at best incomplete.
Read More
Recycling Process • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
The New Math, Part 2
Recycling, composting and reusing materials reduces or eliminates greenhouse gas emissions at various points in the manufacturing process.
Read More
Recycling Process • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
The New Math, Part 1
Most metrics like WARM that address the lifecycle impacts of "stuff" do not include all of the ancillary impacts related to it.
Read More
Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Student Move Out Day, Part 2
There are over 1,500 4-year colleges and universities across the U.S. and almost all of them have some portion of their enrollment that lives on campus and has to move out at the end of the year. When those students move out, there is a huge surge of trash that goes along with it. At more residential schools, it is not uncommon to see trash totals nearly double the month that students move out.
Read More
Education • Operations • Planning
Know Your Campus, Part 1
Every campus is a little bit different. Ironically, if you break a campus down into individual parts (e.g. traditional dormitory-style residence halls, apartment/suite style residence halls, faculty offices, departmental offices, cash-operations dining, dining commons, etc.), each individual part is actually pretty darn similar. But what makes each campus completely unique is the combination of parts, scale of the parts, the overall academic philosophy, and the fundamental business model of the campus. For the next few blog posts, I am planning to focus on some of the biggest differences and some fundamental changes those differences bring.
Read More
Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
An Open Letter to Students During Move Out
This is an open letter to college students, their families, and their friends all across the country. Please forward this to anyone that you know who is moving out of a residence hall in the next few months or just as importantly anyone who is going to a college or university campus to help their child, sibling or friend move out
Read More
Metrics • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
Measuring Net Improvements
We talk a lot in absolute terms: “zero waste,” “zero emissions.” But what do we really mean? Are we talking about net improvements, or are we merely transferring problems?
Read More
Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Planning for Student Move Out
At every residential school I have ever worked with, the trash nearly doubles in May when the students move out. Way too much of that is perfectly nice stuff that is not deliberately left behind. It is left behind because it didn’t fit.
Read More
Landfill • Logistics • Waste and Recycling
Storage: Recycling Logistics, Part 2
Storing stuff, at least commercially, can be harder than you think. When you grow up with a family member that is a borderline hoarder, that can be a surprising realization. After all, if one person can store every issue of Consumer Reports since 1978 just in case they need to look up a review of something they buy at a yard/tag/garage sale (I wish I was making that part up), you would think that a campus of 10,000 could fairly easily store a trailer-load of baled paper in order to ship it to market.
Read More
Best practices • Logistics • Waste and Recycling
The Theory of Relativity, Part 2
Nothing exists in a vacuum. There are alternatives. The degree to which something is good or bad depends on what you compare it to. We need to stop thinking in black and white terms, and embrace the shades of gray. And by shades of gray, I am referring to the full spectrum of alternatives, not the E.L. James bestsellers that cause me to get funny looks from some clerks when I go to the hardware store to buy electrical cord zip ties.
Read More
Best practices • Logistics • Recycling Topics
The Theory of Relativity, Part 1
I think this issue of relativity is something that needs to be addressed in the recycling and sustainability industry. Too often we throw around terms. We declare that something is sustainable, that something is “green,” that something will save money, or will save energy. Or conversely, we ask whether something is one of those things. But, too often, we fail to give context. The truthfulness of our statements or the answers to our questions may depend on what we compare something to. Context and alternatives matter.
Read More
Operations • Planning • Recycling Topics
Budgeting for Recycling Expenses
Successfully growing and sustaining recycling programs can sometimes depend on something as simple as where you budget recycling expenses. As budgets are being set for next fiscal year, now is the time to think about what you want to accomplish next year, how you want to fund it, and perhaps most importantly where you want to fund it.
Read More
Best practices • Logistics • Recycling Process
Impact of Recycling, Part 2
As I have said in several presentations, if the only thing you care about is keeping stuff out of the landfill, littering works as well as recycling or any other sustainable resource management activity. At some point, we need to look beyond keeping stuff out of the landfill and really look at the impact of what we are doing. What are the financial impacts of your alternatives? What are the environmental impacts or the social impacts?
Read More
Best practices • Logistics • Recycling Process
Impact of Recycling, Part 1
Why do you recycle? At some point, we have to talk about impact. Because not all recycling is created equal. How you recycle stuff matters. In some cases it matters as much if not more than whether you recycle at all.
Read More
Education • Operations • Planning
Sustainability Projects and Student Groups
As a staff member or administrator, working with student clubs and organizations can sometimes be both the most rewarding experience and sometimes the most frustrating. Don’t let this potentially great experience be doomed by false expectations.
Read More
Compost • Planning • Sustainability
Pre-Consumer Composting
There are many reasons why people decide to compost food waste. In some cases, you might be trying to proactively make your operation more sustainable. In other cases, you might only be trying to ward off a group of riled up activists who are approaching your office like villagers storming the gates of Frankenstein’s castle, pitchforks and torches in hand. Regardless of why you are composting food waste, when people think of food waste, they sometimes only think about post-consumer plate scrapings.
Read More
Helping Students Understand Staff
Every year, the Beloit Mindset List tries to help faculty and staff relate to the mindset of the incoming 1st year college class. As a faculty or staff member, this is a terrifying list, where you realize how old you are getting. But what about the reverse? How does an incoming class understand the 30-65 year old faculty and staff around them?
Read More
Compost • Planning • Sustainability
Compost Apocalypse - Is Your Facility Prepared?
With a little planning you can make a food composting program a success – and something that will be positive for everyone involved.
Read More
Best practices • Education • Waste and Recycling
Recycling at Student Orientation
New students are coming. And when they get to campus, those first few hours, days, and weeks will be what they imprint on, and it will shape their entire college experience. If you can imprint positive recycling behaviors on them right away, those behaviors are likely to carry with them their entire time on campus. If you miss that window and they imprint on negative behaviors, you will spend the next 4 years overcoming that negative imprinting.
Read More
Best practices • Recycling Process • Waste and Recycling
A Picture Says 1,000 Words, Part 2
A bulletin board completely covered with posters. A cacophony of words and images passing by when you are already overloaded on words and images from hours of time reading textbooks, staring at a laptop or sitting in class. So how do you make your posters and promotional posters stand out? How do you make sure they are more than just white noise?
Read More
Best practices • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
A Picture Says 1,000 Words, Part 1
A sign on a recycling bin trying to convey information as you walk past. Yes a picture is worth a thousand words. But what words is that picture saying? Is it conveying the information that you want people to understand?
Read More
Funding Your Recycling Program
One of the cardinal mistakes that most people make is to assume that because you have a funding need and someone else has funding to give that you are automatically a good match. Too often, I think that presumption leads to frustration and ill will. A successful funding match needs a little more.
Read More
Funding Your Recycling Program
In my earlier “Has Your Recycling Program Evolved” posts 1 and 2, I talked about the stages that each recycling program goes through in its evolution. One of the reasons that people often get stuck in one of the earlier phases is because of the capital investment required to advance to the next phase of the operation. So how do you get the funding that you need to advance to the next phase of your program?
Read More
Best practices • Recycling Process • Recycling Topics
Targeting Your Message
Hopefully before reading this you have sorted out the who, what, when, where, why and how of your recycling education. Now, the best way to explain this is with some hunting references and analogies. For those of you who are opposed to hunting for food, before you start dusting off your old Ted Nugent hate mail to resend to me, and lest this content gets lost in any controversy about hunting, let’s assume I am talking about nature photography. The analogies work either way.
Read More
Best practices • Logistics • Waste and Recycling
Recycling PET Clamshells
The clear plastic clamshell. Other than bottled water, I’m not sure anything instills a more divisive reaction on campus. It is the darling of many to-go food packagers and dining managers for its display properties, a chance to showcase the care that went into making a food item. For many campus diners, it allows for portability and mobility for a wide variety of dietary choices, not just the previously available paper-wrapped deli sandwich. Yet clamshells have also been the bane of many campus environmental groups, a very visual sign of the wastes associated with grab-n-go dining, and the target of many environmental initiatives.
Read More
I Want a Pony: Recycling Logistics, Part 1
Wanting to divert something is very different than being able to viably do so. Without an understanding of logistics, you run the risk that your recycling/solid waste/sustainable materials management master plan has little more viability than a condo-dwelling child’s “I want a pony” wish list to Santa.
Read More
Compost Kin, Part 2
Before embarking on such a program, you need to understand that composting is not the art of making food waste disappear out of a trash can. Composting is a specific biological process. Unfortunately, there are a lot of similar and related processes that too often get lumped together under the compost name.
Read More
Compost Kin, Part 1
Food waste is one of the largest components left in the waste stream, especially in regions that have already enacted other recycling programs. As such, composting and related activities are one of the most popular “next steps” to many campus and municipal recycling programs.
Read More
Best practices • Planning • Sustainability
Embracing the Mundane
I want to change the world. It has been a rallying cry for folks entering the environmental field for a generation. As I near 25 years in this field, I realized something. That I have seen more programs fail, not because of a lack of big ideas, or great ideals, but because of mundane details.
Read More
Education • Operations • Waste and Recycling
Aligning Chores, Part 1
There are a lot of different materials to recycle on a college or university campus and a lot of steps needed to make recycling work. So how do you decide who does what tasks?
Read More
Best practices • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
The Bell Curve, An Interlude
OK, so here’s the mea culpa where I realize that I have probably skipped a step during the time that I have been writing this blog. If you have never seen me speak publicly, there is a core tenet that I often talk about that I have found in my 20+ years of implementing recycling and materials sustainability programs. That is that there is a bell curve of participation.
Read More
Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
Beyond Sustainability, Part 2
How resilient is your campus? In part 1 of this post, I addressed some headwinds for the sustainability movement and suggested that resiliency may be a better alternative for many campuses.
Read More
Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
Cardboard Recycling & Student Move In
Cardboard is coming. A lot of it. On campus terms, for many schools, you are looking at as much as an extra month’s worth of cardboard that arrives the first week when students move-in. So what do you do with it all?
Read More
Education • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
Recycling at Student Move In
New students are coming. If you can imprint positive recycling behaviors on them right away, those behaviors are likely to carry with them their entire time on campus. If you miss that window and they imprint on negative behaviors, you will spend the next 4 years overcoming that negative imprinting.
Read More
A Segmented Approach to Recycling Education
What is the goal of your education program? Who is your target audience? What do you hope to accomplish with your education program? Do you have the right tools and approach to get what you need?
Read More
Education • Operations • Waste and Recycling
Understanding Why
In my last post, I focused on the critical role that information plays in your recycling program. But there is one big piece that information doesn’t cover. That is why. There are a lot of different parts of “why”, depending on what you intend to do with it.
Read More
Education • Operations • Waste and Recycling
Everything I Know I Learned from Where?
One of the trickiest parts of running recycling or sustainability on a college or university campus is education. Implementing recycling education at an institution whose very mission is education runs into a lot of potential pitfalls and conflicts.
Read More
Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Learning To Bunt
What did you do today to help get some runners on base and some points on the board?
Read More
Operations • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Getting Home Safely
In my decades in the recycling field, I have seen a lot of facilities, seen a lot of recycling plans, and had a lot of conversations about recycling programs. Yet one that will always stick with me was on a tour of a recycling processing facility in which there was an operations manager who said very proudly, “our number one goal is to make sure our people get home safe at the end of the day.”
Read More
Best practices • Planning • Recycling Topics
It's Nothing Personal
Beyond personal interests and motivations though, there is a series of “business decisions” that drive all of the decision-making at any institution or business. Understanding these drivers is often the key to getting the support that you need for your program.
Read More
Planning • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
Balance Recycling Drivers
We focus a lot on making recycling easy. We try to make it easy for waste generators to recycle. We try to make it easy to understand. We try to make recycling bins easy to find. Hopefully we focus on trying to make it easy for staff to collect. Yet somehow, too often, we forget to make recycling easy to support. Making your program easy to support is critical to getting the administrative support that you need to sustain the program.
Read More
Paved with Good Intentions
As I noted in my last couple of posts, recycling rates do have value as a benchmarking tool. So how did we get to a point where folks are decrying recycling rates and calling for their end? This is really a case of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions.
Read More
Best practices • Metrics • Waste and Recycling
Measuring Your Recycling Rate: Strength in Numbers
In my last post, I talked about some of the pros and cons of both the “% discards recycled” metric and the “per-capita recycling metric”. One of the biggest problems with recycling rates, and one of the reasons that has led to people to call for their demise has been their misuse.
Read More
Measuring Your Recycling Rate: Understanding Metrics
I’m talking about the different metrics that we use to measure and contextualize our recycling data.
Read More
Best practices • Metrics • Waste and Recycling
Measuring Your Recycling Rate: How Do You Measure Up?
“What’s your recycling rate?” That term has been so misused and misunderstood over the years that my long-time colleague Jerry Powell of Resource Recycling Magazine called for the death of recycling rates in a recent editorial.
Read More
Recycling Process • Waste and Recycling
Improving the Economics of Your Recycling Program
With a modicum of understanding about recycling markets, you will be able to significantly improve the economics of your recycling program.
Read More
Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
How On Earth Do You Reach Students?
I have been asked some version of that question more times that I can count by more people than I can count. But the same question is asked in many different areas of many different target audiences: residents, employees, etc.
Read More
Operations • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Surviving a Waste Audit, Part 2
I think anyone should experience a full-blown waste sort at least once. As a learning experience, it is a real eye opener. However, I don’t think it is often necessary to determine whether or not you should target something for recycling or waste reduction efforts.
Read More
Operations • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Surviving a Waste Audit, Part 1
Whether you are just starting out, or trying to figure out what to do next, you can’t divert stuff out of the trash if you don’t know what’s available in the trash to be diverted.
Read More
Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
They're Coming. Are You Ready? Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I talked about how much the world has changed. I urged readers to think about their recycling programs and to update them accordingly. The question is how?
Read More
Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
They're Coming. Are You Ready? Part 1
The class of 2015 is almost upon us (the year in which the entering 1st year class will graduate from a traditional 4-year college)
Read More
Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Recycling Program Evolution, Part 2
It is this intermediate phase that seems to be the most complicated for many programs to get through. Every transition from one phase to the next takes planning and hard work. But in over 20 years of working with recycling programs, I have seen more programs get stuck in this intermediate phase of their development than any other. Some spend decades in this phase whereas others progress through it relatively quickly to get to the integrated sustainable program that they really want.
Read More
Recycling Program Evolution, Part 1
Every recycling program goes through 3 stages: Pilot Program, Intermediate phase, and Integrated into daily facility operations. Understanding where you are in the evolution of your recycling program is an important tool.
Read More
How High-Aesthetic Recycling Bins Help to Promote Your Sustainability Efforts
Because people cannot see most aspects of your sustainability program, believing your sustainability promotion takes a certain element of faith. As such, that promotion can be greatly enhanced or badly derailed by the visual cues that people do see.
Read More
Best practices • Waste and Recycling
Better Aesthetics Equal Better Results
Recycling can get pretty complicated at times, but successful recycling is based on two fairly straightforward concepts:Getting as many people as possible to put the right stuff in the right bin as often as possible and getting that stuff picked up and transported to the proper manufacturing facility as efficiently as possible.
Read More
Recycling is a Manufacturing Process
At its core, recycling is more about making our manufacturing and consumption more sustainable than it is about landfilling or waste management.
Read More
Best practices • Education • Waste and Recycling
Finding the Right Level
For many student-run recycling programs, or other pilot programs, we are at that point in the year where they need to start thinking about administrative support, either to continue their program next semester, or to start thinking about building support to expand the program next year. Because of that, let me take a departure from talking about measuring recycling rates and talk for a post or two about getting support for your recycling program.
Read More