Boosting Recycling with a Private-Public-Private Partnership

The firm’s Social Responsibility Committee is having a busy year.  We started composting which reduces both our contribution to landfills and our trash hauling expenses.  We are replacing all of the T-12 fluorescent bulbs and ballasts in the office with much more efficient T-8 bulbs and ballasts, to reduce our power usage and energy bills.   We are exploring the possibility of installing solar panels at our building to generate energy.  We held a successful blood drive for our office neighborhood and we have a coat drive in process.  One of our most interesting activities was a presentation for everyone in the firm on recycling and composting by a representative of the Chittenden Solid Waste District (CSWD), our municipal solid waste authority.  The CSWD presentation led us to partner with The Sustainability Academy for an exciting recycling project through the Aveda company.  It’s amazing how much there is to know about recycling!  Among other things, we learned that the many plastic caps that well-meaning citizens include for recycling end up in huge piles on the floor of the CSWD facility because they are so small, they fall out of the bales of plastic bundled up by CSWD for shipment to a recycling facility.  The plastic caps are on bottles for so many items we use every day, including shampoo, juice, water, milk, soda, lotions, sunscreen, laundry detergent and prescriptions.  Even if people put plastic caps in recycling bins, CSWD ultimately has to send the caps to the landfill because they don’t have the ability to recycle plastic caps, even though these plastic caps are recyclable.  So our Social Responsibility Committee sprang into action and found a way to recycle plastic caps.  Aveda is a botanical beauty products company with a mission that includes protecting the beauty of the environment.  Aveda offers the Recycle Caps with Aveda program for schools to collect plastic caps and send them to Aveda for recycling.  Our firm is partnering with the Sustainability Academy at Lawrence Barnes school, a public magnet school in Burlington that is operated in partnership with Shelburne Farms. The Sustainability Academy is participating in the Recycle Caps with Aveda program.  So we are collecting plastic caps used in the office (we go through lots of carton of coffee creamer with those darned plastic caps!) or used by our personnel at their homes and we deliver them to The Sustainability Academy for recycling.  The Sustainability Academy was thrilled to have a local business contact them about partnering in the program.  And being all about sustainability, they even re-purpose the caps for lessons on counting, sorting and colors before the caps go on to Aveda for recycling.  I love this example of a private-public-private partnership to boost local recycling capability and teach sustainability!  And it's gratifying that we created a way for folks at our firm to be a part of it.