How to Recycle Less and Do More

I'm convinced that smart, hardworking people can profit from practicing what many people call the R's of effective waste management. The R's aren't new, but the order of priority is much more important than people realize. Specifically:

- Reduce or redesign (or both) by using less material and resources and producing less waste. This is where you get the biggest net environmental impact -- and net profit.

- Reuse whatever you have to use by putting materials and products back into service. This is the second biggest waste-saving and money-saving opportunity, much larger than through recycling.

- Recycle what you can't reuse by transforming used materials and products into new ones. Recycling is the buzzword that gets people's attention, but it really is the lowest-priority choice and the slowest payback option.

At my company, Stonyfield Farm, we've learned that reducing waste means consuming less and discarding less. And since source reduction, particularly when it comes to packaging, stops waste before it starts, it's the most economical and ecological choice. What's exciting to me is how many companies now seem to have finally figured this out. Some -- like Wal-Mart, which has received a lot of attention recently for its ambitious plans to reduce its environmental footprint -- are companies that I would have never expected to be a part of this conversation when we launched Stonyfield 25 years ago. The fact that they are is creating an extraordinary opportunity to green our economy.

Incorporating reusable materials and equipment into a production operation like ours at Stonyfield is difficult but not impossible. An example of reuse is with the cardboard boxes that our plastic yogurt cups are shipped in. Over a decade ago we found a company that buys them from us -- and re-sells them to clothing and auto parts manufacturers to ship their products. Hopefully the boxes will be used many times before they are recycled.

Recycling is almost universally regarded as a virtue. I beg to differ. The act of recycling actually means that we have failed to reduce or reuse. The EPA's own numbers delineate that failure: Each of us now produces 4.4 pounds of waste each day, nearly twice as much as thirty-five years ago. Consequently, we have to spend enormous amounts of energy and money carting away all of this waste to someplace else, where it will be made into something different -- a process that releases still more CO2 into the atmosphere.

What is more, recycling affects only a fraction of solid waste. At best, 5 percent of plastic gets recycled. We do better with aluminum cans, but the recycle rate is still only about 45% percent.

Even when commonly used and supposedly recyclable waste materials are taken to a recycling center, the energy contained in them isn't necessarily recaptured. Take certain yogurt cups and bottles made of high density polyethylene. Look on their bottoms and you're likely to see the number 2, meaning they are made of the same base resin. Yet, your municipal recycling plant likely accepts only the bottles. This is because all number 2 plastics are not the same. The number 2 used to make bottles has a different melting point than that used to make wide mouth containers like yogurt cups. Since they are different, they cannot generally be recycled together. Little surprise, then, that so many supposedly recyclable plastic containers end up in landfills.

At Stonyfield, we still recycle, but only as a last resort after we've tried to design waste out of the product or process. We've been working for many years with a Waltham, Massachusetts-based company, Recycline, that will make toothbrush and razor handles from our used cups.

To me, recycling is an obvious piece of the overall puzzle, but only after all else has failed. It is to waste management what carbon offsetting is to climate change, another issue I'm deeply concerned about. It shouldn't be seen as the point of entry to environmental responsibility. We must first reduce our impact, our resource demand, our climate footprint -- and recycle and offset to make up the difference only when we've done all else we can do.

Wal-Mart is far from perfect, and -- by the way -- the same can be said for any company, my own included. But as the world's largest company, they are worth watching, for there is no doubt that business will need to be a big part of the solution to our environmental challenges. And since they are obsessed with eliminating cost, they help to validate my belief that going "green" can be highly profitable. As part of its quest to become a green giant, Wal-Mart has pledged to eliminate a quarter of the solid waste currently produced by its U.S. facilities. When the company took an environmental impact team up on its suggestion that Wal-Mart bundle for resale the plastic that it used to send to landfills or incinerators, the company saved $28 million a year. Another $2.4 million of cost savings was lopped off by asking the supplier of its private-label Kid Connection line of toys to eliminate unneeded packaging. Wal-Mart now ships nearly five hundred fewer containers each year, reducing shipping costs and saving 3,800 trees and a million barrels of oil in the bargain.

Indeed, here's how CEO Lee Scott wants his employees to think about waste: "If we throw it away, we had to buy it first. So we pay twice--once to get it, once to have it taken away. What if we reverse that? What if our suppliers send us less, and everything they send us has value as a recycled product? No waste, and we get paid instead." Now that's smart talk.

Comments

[montemalone]

I grew up drinking milk, and occasionally Coke, from glass bottles that, when empty, were returned to the place of purchase. Since they were taken back at the same time the replacement was purchased, no net energy wasted. The delivery truck returned the empties in the space left vacant when the new merchandise was delivered to the store.
I would think the bottle washing equipment used less energy than the process of pumping, refining, and transporting crude oil to make plastic bottles which are then shipped to dairys and Coke bottlers.
Besides, milk and Coke tasted better and stayed colder in glass bottles.

[realitytrumpsbull]

They say that out there in the Pacific there's this island of junk floating around in the water, that's about twice the size of the state of Texas. All plastic. If you don't buy it to begin with, there's nothing to recycle. Plastic is forever...

[sheila]

"At my company, Stonyfield Farm, we've learned that reducing waste means consuming less and discarding less. And since source reduction, particularly when it comes to packaging, stops waste before it starts, it's the most economical and ecological choice."

this is great, so why aren't more people and companies pushing HARD for the same in energy policy? the California wilderness is under SEIGE right now by money-grubby "manufacturers" of "renewable energy" (snort!) who are getting away, literally, with murder by being allowed to kill off hundreds of thousands of acres of our gorgeous, critical BLM ecosystems (super cheap) so they can keep their chokeholds over ratepayers. and our tax dollars are paying for it.

why shouldn't WE get our money back in the form of 100% buyback programs, solar panel subsidies, and SERIOUS conservation/net zero building programs? it is incredibly wasteful to kill wilderness (which is permanent) only to generate excessive electricity to consume more goods. energy is a crucial part of this cycle, and we are at a crossroads.

people like you with a platform need to make sure sane policies are heard - NO MORE remote generation that kills our wilderness to feed McMansions and their big screens!

[jackpinesavage]

Way2muchsense brought up an important point about how much power consumers have in the waste stream...i.e. not enough.

If we really want to push towards green collar jobs, we need to start thinking of ways we can build businesses around using waste as input. Polartec's use of plastic soda bottles to make fleece is a good example. It would, perhaps, require redesigning things upstream so that the waste can be more readily used, but that would be well worth it.

America loves to think of itself as "can do" and tout ingenuity. Its time to put our money where our mouths are. Turning at least part of our waste stream into industrial inputs would also be a good way to recreate manufacturing jobs...seeing as that 3,000,000 of those have left the country in the last seven years, we could use them.

[lamarguerite]

Thanks Gary.

First let me say I deeply admire your work as an environmentally responsible corporate leader and citizen.

Second, like you, I am very concerned about the implied goodness of recycling and carbon offsets. There is already so little that is understood by the majority of citizens, when it comes to fighting global warming. The simpler the message the better.

I wish there was a national campaign that would focus on just the 'reduce' message. Of course, in order to not come out as reductionist, that campaign would need to tout the many benefits of not consuming as much. More time, more money, more freedom. Those are huge privileges that we squander away whenever we spend for no good reason.

http://lamarguerite.wordpress.com
'It's All About Green Psychology'

[way2muchsense]

Down here in End-Userland, we're mostly restricted to the third option - recycling. We have little say over how manufacturers package things, and attempts at reuse result in, for example, bales of plastic grocery bags in the basement. There are only so many of them that can be reused to dispose of cat poop, and they wear out after being reused a few times. That leaves recycling, but I hear plastic bags jam the machines that chop up plastic at the recycling plant. They get them anyway, if for no other reason than to draw attention to the problem.

I would like to drop a roll of quarters on what I believe is the largest offender insofar as excessive packaging is concerned. It has nothing to do with clamshell packaging. It's mail order. I ordered a vinyl disc cleaner, you know, the little fuzzy thing with the handle used to clean the dust and crap from old-fashioned LP records. The whole business, including a bottle of cleaning solution, would fit in my pocket, yet I also received a rather large box, a 100-page catalog, and about six liters of foam peanuts with my order that I now have to dispose of. Nothing in my order was anything close to fragile, yet my order was packed as if I had ordered a dozen antique glass Christmas tree ornaments.

You people running the businesses via eBay, if the shoe fits...

[jackpinesavage]

Yes! Mr. Hirshberg, you consistently show that you get it; thank you. Yours is the kind of environmental thinking that we need more of. And i have made note of your company, it will receive my money.

I came to the conclusion that Global Warming is not the disease that faces us. It is a symptom of the disease. The disease is waste. Any attempt to alleviate the symptom without addressing the underlying cause of said symptom does little, or no, good over the long term.

Nature should be our model. Nothing is ever wasted in nature, and given a long enough time line, nature will find a way to make use of our waste too. But we don't have the benefit of an infinite timeline.

Personally, i make most of my shopping decision based on the product's origin and packaging. I try to buy what i can reuse at home; failing that i look for something not over packaged and packaging that can actually be recycled. Glass wins over plastic every time.