By Christopher Galantino, Cornell University, President Cornell Sustainability Consultants, SWEEP Intern During my junior year at Cornell, I got involved with the Solid Waste Environmental Excellence Protocol (SWEEP) after SWEEP Founder, Rob Watson (who also created the LEED standard), came to Cornell for the annual Business Impact Symposium. I was offered a summer internship with […]
Category: Blogs
Recycling: Hang Together or Hang Separately
Reports of the death of recycling are greatly exaggerated. There is great chaos under heaven and the situation is excellent. Crisis equals opportunity. The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient. The only good recyclable is a dead recyclable. Wait, what? A few weeks ago I wrote a blog talking about the current crisis […]
Time is Running Out: The U.S. Landfill Capacity Crisis
By James Thompson, Waste Business Journal, SWEEP Steering Committee & Rob Watson, Chief Science Officer, Eco-Hub LLC. Founder & Co-chair SWEEP Standard. A pair of interrelated storm clouds looms over the waste industry, providing perhaps a gray lining to the rosy 2018 Q1 earnings reports released by most of the major waste companies. The first, […]
It’s past time to address the safety and dignity of our sanitation workers
By Bob Gedert, Past-President of the National Recycling Coalition & SWEEP Steering Committee Member This article was originally published by Resource Recycling. On Feb. 1, 1968, two City of Memphis garbage men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck. Twelve days later, frustrated by the city’s response to the latest […]
Measuring Carbon Savings is the Answer! What was the Question?
By Adam Gendell, Associate Director Sustainable Packaging Coalition, GreenBlue & SWEEP Steering Committee Member If your state reported that their waste diversion practices resulted in prevention of 1,802,794 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, would you be impressed? That’s a big number. What if you learned those savings equated to removing 379,535 cars from the […]
The Importance of Assessing Recycling Audit Residuals
By Jordan Fengel, Environmental Services Program Coordinator, Georgetown, TX. Member SWEEP Municipal Standard Committee The act of recycling is necessary, and that is a simple fact. Through recycling, local, regional, and global economies are created enabling used and discarded consumer goods to be collected, reprocessed and reused. All of this allows for finite resources to […]
Look on the bright side: Chinese recycling import ban is very good news for our oceans
By Adam Gendell, Associate Director Sustainable Packaging Coalition, GreenBlue & SWEEP Steering Committee Member “China Fallout Continues” reads a newsletter subject line that just popped in my inbox – yet another headline addressing China’s import ban on foreign waste that has dominated recent news in the waste and recycling industry circles. It’s safe to say that everyone […]
The Best We Can Do?
By Duncan Watson, Assistant Public Works Director, City of Keene; President, Board of Trustees, Northeast Resource Recovery Association; Member, SWEEP Steering Committee* I was watching a show on television recently about the Hubble telescope. After they fixed the lens that had a microscopic defect, the heavens that we had heretofore been blind to suddenly came […]
China’s Import Policy Changes will make Recycling Stronger
Susan Robinson, Sr. Public Affairs Director at WM and SWEEP Co-Chair 危机 “WHEN WRITTEN IN CHINESE, THE WORD ‘CRISIS’ IS COMPOSED OF TWO CHARACTERS. ONE REPRESENTS DANGER AND THE OTHER REPRESENTS OPPORTUNITY” —John F. Kennedy When I first started working in the recycling industry many decades ago, the municipality I worked […]
Exclusive Waste Franchises Promote High Standards and Protect Community Interests
By Michael Mignano, Senior Research Analyst, International Brotherhood of Teamsters Municipalities across the US have outsourced waste collection to private companies with varying success. According to a guide published by In the Public Interest (ITPI), numerous problems can arise from poorly crafted contracts including, “disputes over pricing and billing…prolonged labor disruptions and uncollected garbage – […]