Boosting Our Recycling Efforts

Our firm's Social Responsibility Committee has been busy this year.  We have implemented composting at the office, which dramatically reduces both our contribution to the landfills and our annual garbage hauling expense.  We are replacing all of our T-8 flourescent lighting with T-12 bulbs, to cut down our energy usage and electric bills.  We held a very successful blood drive at the office and we have a coat drive underway.  And the list goes on.  One of our most interesting activities was a presentation to the firm by a representative of the Chittenden Solid Waste District, our county's solid waste authority, about recycling and composting.  We learned, among other things, that our local solild waste system does not have the capacity to recycle plastic caps and milk cartons but these items are recycled in other locations.  CSWC ends up with huge piles of plastic caps that are put into the recycling system by well-meaning citizens but they are so small, they fall out of the bales of plastic that CSWD bundles up for shipment to recycling plants.  So our  Social Reponsibility Committee sprang into action and discovered that the Aveda company offers plastic cap recycling through partnership with local schools.  The program called Recycle Caps with Aveda allows local schools to collect caps and send them to Aveda for recycling.  A local participating school is the Lawrence Barnes Sustainability Academy, a public magnet school in Burlington.  We contacted the Lawyrence Barnes Sustainability Academey and they were thrilled to have a business as a partner in this program.  So now we collect plastic caps at the office and give them to to the school to be recycles in teh Aveda program.   What a great example of a private-public-private partnership to expand recyclingwher