10
Reduce—
Getting to Net Zero
Emissions and Releases

This chapter is about voluntary commitments—going beyond government regulations—to making continuous improvement in reducing your total environmental footprint. Many companies and organizations are even making the commitment to reduce their emissions to air, releases to water, and solid waste to zero. It seems impossible to do and even more so to do it cost-effectively, yet all it takes is a voluntary commitment. The following examples show how it is done.

Net-zero-waste pioneer Gunter Pauli was CEO of Ecover, a small company that makes cleaning products (laundry powder, dishwashing liquid, car wax) from natural and renewable raw materials. Ecover opened a near-zero-emissions factory in Gunter’s native Belgium in 1992. A grass roof kept the plant cool in summer and warm in winter. The water treatment system ran on wind and solar energy. The factory became a media darling. Ecover captured 6 percent of the Belgian detergent market in eighteen months without spending a dime on advertising. Gunter doesn’t claim that zero emissions are cheaper, just that you make more money. David worked with him in the development of Gunter’s Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives¹ pavilion for the 2000 Hannover World’s Fair.

The Green Festival,² operated by Green America, conducts two-to-three-day festivals in five major U.S. cities with over 200,000 attendees. Denise Hamler and her crew of passionate volunteers recover 97 percent of their waste! For example, every food item, utensil (made from cornstarch), paper plate, cup, and napkin is composted.

David worked with a water-based-paint manufacturer after the company decided to go for zero releases to water. Once the decision was made, the creativity of the employees made all the rest possible. They switched all their ingredients to nontoxic materials, but the biggest step in getting to zero was that they changed the order in which they manufactured paint each day. They started the day manufacturing white and the lightest colors and moved to darker colors and then black at the end of the day. Because of this, they did not have to clean out the lines and vats between batch runs. When they washed out the lines at the end of the day, they put the wash water into a tank and flocculated it, letting the solids settle so that they could be dried and shipped to a landfill. Not only did the plant become a zero discharge facility, it saved money on chemical costs and sewer charges.

Industries in the Soviet Empire were responsible for incredible amounts of pollution. Just before its end, the Soviet regime enacted a regulation to reduce water pollution that was incredibly effective. Factories were required to discharge their effluents upstream from their freshwater intake. Pollution disappeared quickly.

The quickest and most cost-effective way of reducing to zero is to follow the rules described below.

Rule 1—Set a Target for Reduction

If you set a target for reduction, you are likely to hit it. For example, on dairy farms, water use can range from 12 to 150 gallons per cow per day.³ What accounts for these huge differences has to do with whether anyone cares about how much water is used. Farms that meter their water use and set standards have very little water use compared to farms that don’t. They set a target.

Another example is Stonyfield Farm, where Mission Action Program teams each have their own set of metrics targeted for reduction. Because of this, as Gary Hirshberg said, “The MAP teams are hacking away at the metrics.”

One tip used by a lot of companies is for any operations requiring washing: use your last rinse water for your first wash water.

Rule 2—Measure and Publish Your Releases to Water, Emissions to Air, Solid Waste, and Recycling

If you can measure it, you can reduce it. To get to zero, look at your ten biggest emissions to air, your ten biggest releases to water, and your ten biggest solid waste items. (See chapters 2 and 4 for information on how to get these figures.) Identify where each item is coming from. Publish these numbers on your Web site, in your sustainability and annual reports, in your company newsletter, on CSRwire.com, on a poster in your break room, on the back of your purchase order forms, or in communications with customers. Then ask yourself these questions about each item: “I see how much I buy of each, but how much do I actually use?” “What would it take for me to discharge, emit, or throw out less or none of this?”

As for packaging material for the supplies that come to you regularly, ask your vendors and suppliers if these items can be delivered in reusable boxes, containers, or totes that you can send back to them for refilling when they are empty. At the same time, ask what kind of discount you will enjoy for reusing the containers instead of throwing them out.

Rule 3—Set Internal Standards as Benchmarks for Performance

How much water (hot and cold) does it take to make a batch? How much does it take to clean out the equipment? In chapter 7 we discussed reducing energy use by installing meters and programmable controls. The same holds true for your use of water and other raw materials. Put meters everywhere and assign every meter to someone who will be responsible for keeping track of the baseline and, over time, working to reduce the quantity of water or other material used per unit produced. Install flow restrictors in places where there is no benefit to an unrestricted flow, like bathroom sinks and toilets.

Pick the average performance as the standard and incrementally raise the bar over time. For example, if the worst individual performance in cleaning a vat is 250 gallons of water use, the best is 20 gallons, and the average is 80 gallons, set 80 as the standard. Naysayers will not be able to criticize because at least one employee can do it in 20. When you reset the standard (in no sooner than two years), the worst performance will be 80 and the best perhaps better than 20, thus increasing the standard for reduction.

Time needs to be factored into performance standards as well. The timely use of raw materials can make a difference in how efficiently they can be used. In farming, for example, about half of the nitrogen in chemical fertilizer makes it to the crop; the rest is lost to the environment, causing environmental problems like the great dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay. If you apply manure fertilizer and wait just one week instead of immediately incorporating it into the soil, the amount of available nutrients for your crops drops from 75 percent to 15 percent.⁴ In other words, wait one week and you waste 85 percent of the fertilizer you applied. Worse than waste, the wasted nutrients end up polluting downstream, as the nitrogen lost due to volatilization to the atmosphere eventually precipitates back to earth.

Rule 4—Improve Quality and Cleanliness

Defects are a major cause of waste in some industries. One way to reduce defects is to track the results of your quality control programs. Another way is to implement ISO 9000—the global total quality management standard. By improving quality, you will reduce defects and thereby reduce waste.

In the electronics semiconductor industry, for example, semiconductor chips are made by drawing a circuit diagram and photoreducing it onto a semiconducting material. As semi-conductor chips got smaller, dust began to have a huge impact by causing defects. At this point, the ability to further miniaturize has mostly to do with the ability to create evercleaner environments.

In most companies, cleanliness has a lot to do with yields and QC rejects. Cleanliness may or may not be next to godliness, but it’s right on top of profitability. Stonyfield Farm uses live cultures in making its yogurt. Imagine what could happen if these cultures got contaminated. The company’s manufacturing facility looks almost like a semiconductor clean room or hospital operating theater. It even has clean stations to ensure that shoes get disinfected before people move from one room to another.

In the most tragic example of poor sanitation, product contamination at a well-respected beverage company making juice from natural products ended the life of a young child. Afterward the company added a step to its manufacturing process to ensure aseptic operations. In another example of tragic possibilities, at a high-technology company, David witnessed large amounts of radioactive waste merely cordoned off with clear vinyl sheeting sealed with duct tape.

Rule 5—Dewater and Treat Your Wastewater

Do you have an effluent that contains particulates or solids? Consider dewatering it. A variety of technologies, including centrifuges, belt filters, screw presses, decanters, cyclone separators, and settling ponds and tanks, can help you separate the wastewater from the solids.

If the wastewater gets cleaned enough in this process, perhaps it can be used for some other purpose or directed to an artificial wetland that mimics nature’s methods of purifying water. Or perhaps the liquid can undergo reverse osmosis (RO). RO is a process where pressure is applied to a liquid so that the liquid goes through a semipermeable membrane but the dissolved solids do not. RO is used for detoxifying blood in kidney dialysis, making maple syrup and fruit concentrates, and purifying drinking water and water for specialty applications (including car wash rinse water). RO can, for example, take up to 95 percent of the pollutants out of the water and move them to 20 percent of the water, so that 80 percent of the water has only 5 percent of the pollutants it originally had. Not good enough? You can run it through more RO cycles until you get the water quality you want.

If the solids content of this treated wastewater is too high to run through RO or an artificial wetland, you can treat it biologically in an anaerobic (no-oxygen) process and aerobic (oxygenrich) process or with a microaerobic anoxic (very little oxygen) process. In aerobic processes, biological and chemical oxygen demand is reduced sometimes to nothing. In microaerobic processes, nutrients are biologically converted to inert form (like ammonia into inert nitrogen gas) or biologically sequestered.

The organic content of liquid waste streams can also be treated using anaerobic digestion to produce biogas that contains methane and is flammable. You can then buy an electrical generator that runs on this gas. Stonyfield generates waste yogurt in plastic containers resulting from quality control rejects and statistical quality control sampling of products. It now has a machine that separates the yogurt from the plastic containers so the yogurt can be anaerobically digested and made into gas, which is used to run the plant. Gary Hirshberg recalled, “The water treatment engineers who worked for us used to believe that ‘the solution to pollution is dilution.’ And then we built a wastewater treatment plant that produced methane and less sludge, and we made money.”⁵

Fish farming has become one of the major sources of water pollution in the world. At Australis, where barramundi fish are raised indoors, Josh Goldman said, “We recycle our water sixty times per day and treat it without the use of chemicals, dewater it, and produce an organic fertilizer, which we provide to local farmers twice per year who immediately incorporate it into their soil, eliminating any polluting environmental footprint we might have.”⁶

Anaerobic digestion does not deal with the ammonia nitrogen or phosphorus pollutants in the water, so Australis took water treatment an additional step. Its wastewater goes through a denitrification process that converts the ammonia to nitrate and then converts the nitrate into nitrogen gas, which is what 80 percent of the earth’s atmosphere is made of.

If you dewater organic material to greater than 25 percent solids, you can compost the solids. Composting is a biological process mimicking what happens on the forest floor. In essence, the organic materials undergo decay. According to the EPA’s Process to Further Reduce Pathogens (PFRP) and Vector Attraction Reduction (VAR),⁷ composting can convert material that would have to be sent to a landfill into a usable soil amendment. When composting, it is important to have a six to one carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of the starting materials because the compost will produce (outgas) ammonia if the nitrogen content is too high or will produce methane and VOCs if the carbon content is too high. You can, for example, put corrugated cardboard or newspaper (which is low in nitrogen) in the compost if the nitrogen content is too high. Compost yard waste, foodstuffs, coffee grounds, tea bags, and paper napkins, plates, and tissues from your office and use the material for the indoor plants, giving oxygen to your office space, reducing Dumpster fees and energy use for transport of waste to the landfill, and reducing the burden on landfills.

Windrow composting is the most common form of composting. Long rows of organic material approximately 8 feet tall are set in a field and the rows are mixed frequently, so that what is inside gets to the outside and is exposed to air. Windrow composting, however, is no longer legal in Southern California because the material inside is underoxygenated and undergoes anaerobic decomposition, resulting in emissions of ammonia and VOCs. Composting with pressurized air forced though the compost pile has been shown to be effective in producing composts with 80 percent lower ammonia and VOC outputs than for windrow composting. If the process is done well, the starting material can get composted down to almost nothing—only carbon dioxide, nitrogen gas, water vapor, and a very little bit of solids.

Alternatively, you can dry your dewatered organic solids further and use them as a fuel. For a long time, pulp mills have been powered by combustion of dried organic solids.

The costs to dewater and treat wastewater vary greatly based on the compounds present, the consistency, and the dilutions. Our friend Dr. James Morris has designed wastewater treatment facilities ranging from a system he developed for Tom’s of Maine that treated a very clean (and minty fresh) waste stream to systems for waste streams with dilutions of, for example, 10 milligrams per liter of nitrogen and waste streams that are 10 percent solid, such as livestock manure. In wastewater treatment, whether the influent is sewage, livestock waste, or waste from a manufacturing or processing plant or cleaning operation, a primary treatment process removes as many of the solids as possible, and a secondary treatment process substantially degrades the biological content of the sewage that is derived from human waste, food waste, soap, and detergent.

The average person produces about 9 pounds of nitrogen and 1 pound of phosphorus waste in his or her urine each year. A recent study of all the wastewater treatment facilities in Pennsylvania showed that it costs up to $250 per pound in some treatment plants to remove nitrogen.⁸ On the other hand, you can buy nitrogen and phosphorus credits from companies like Red Barn Trading Company⁹ for $10 per pound. So, in looking at the costs to treat water and mitigate nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, see how cost-effectively you can treat your waste stream. If you can’t treat it for less than $10 per pound, buy credits. They have the same benefit to the environment as treating your wastewater yourself. And if you can mitigate nitrogen and phosphorous for less than $10 per pound, do so and register and then sell your credits to pay for your treatment system.

Rule 6—Reuse Your Gray Water, Treated Wastewater, Solvents, and Oils

The rainwater you collect from your roof and other gray water that your facility produces can be stored and later used to water plants, or it can be sand filtered and used to flush toilets. Wastewater can be treated with reverse osmosis, and the purified portion can be used for nonpotable water uses.

In the previous section, we gave you the basic recipe for separating the water from the solids in your effluent and wet organic waste so that the water can be reused or recycled and the solids composted and used as a soil amendment or burned as a fuel. These processes also produce saleable carbon and nutrient credits. Here are some tips for reusing solvents and oils:

• If you buy and use solvents and then have to pay to dispose of the used solvents, consider installing vacuum distillation equipment to clean and recover your solvents.

• If you extract vegetable oil from feedstock, consider that yields using solvent extraction methods are frequently twice as high as expeller (mechanical squeezing) methods. With solvent extraction, you can even choose plant-based solvents and can use vacuum distillation equipment to clean and recover the solvents.

• If your facility uses any petrochemical product, a NASA spinoff bioremediation product has been developed by Universal Remediation¹⁰ that can capture oil or gas spilled on the ground or be spread over the affected area. Microbes eat the oil and produce compost. The return on investment for this product has inspired Joe to use it at Gasoline Alley. Once the gas and oil is eaten, the remains are thrown in the gardens.

Rule 7—Don’t Emit Your Products or Waste Products into the Air

The atmosphere is not your private profit center.

In keeping with the principle of conservation of matter, a particular waste can manifest itself as a release to water, an emission to air, or a solid waste. When town dumps started to fill up—and worse, leach pollutants into the water table and aquifers—ingenious planners thought of incinerating the waste. If you had 100 tons of waste and you incinerated it, you might end up with only 10 tons of ash. Magic. Where did the other 90 tons go? Up into the air, of course, but some of it precipitated back to earth onto someone else’s property, and some of that reentered the water supply. It turned out that incineration was not an environmental solution. It’s just a way of turning your problem into someone else’s problem. You used to be able to solve the problem of releases to water by just converting them into emissions to air. EPA has wised up to this trick and has tried to work within the constraints of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act to regulate across media (solids, liquid, and gas from the same source simultaneously).

However, this book is not about regulatory compliance but voluntary compliance with your highest principles. Doing the right thing in the context of air emissions is not having emissions to air different than the constituents of air.

If you have unregulated emissions but still have NO_x or SO _x(sulfur oxide) in your emissions to air, consider using a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system that injects ammonia into the stack gases. NO_x is produced in every combustion process; the hotter the combustion temperature, the more NO_x created. You can get rid of the NOx using catalytic converters or the SCR process. SO_x on the other hand, can be produced only if the fuel you are combusting contains sulfur. Low-sulfur fuel produces low-sulfur emissions. To avoid SO_x emissions, therefore, you can pick low-sulfur fuels, treat the sulfur in the smokestack, or remove the sulfur from the fuel before burning it. The process of integrated gasification combined cycles converts coal into a gas and removes the sulfur before the gas is burned.

The best way to get rid of polluting emissions is to require companies to quantify them and publish the results. While U.S. laws were lax in actually proscribing emissions to air (and releases to water), the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) under section 313 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA 313) required the reporting of your emissions and releases of 650 specific toxic chemicals¹¹ above a certain quantity for businesses that have ten or more full-time employees and that fit within a specific NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code. Approximately 1,300 companies required by law to file a TRI joined a program called the EPA 33/50 Program. In this program, some of the biggest polluting companies in the country, once forced to publish their toxic releases, reduced their pollution of 17 priority chemicals by between 33 percent and 50 percent.

Again, if you have compliance requirements, we are assuming that you are meeting them. If you don’t have compliance requirements, do it anyway.

Every company is required to have a loose-leaf binder containing the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) of all the chemicals it uses. First, make sure your binder is complete, accurate, and current. Mark as obsolete and file away old MSDS sheets after you make sure you have the current ones. The MSDS binder is for your and your employees’ protection. In the event of a chemical spill or if some chemical splatters into someone’s face, you don’t want to go running around looking for your MSDS binder and then trying to figure out which of the many seemingly duplicate documents you have is the one to follow for remediation procedures.

Second, go through your MSDS binder to see which chemicals you have are listed as toxic under EPCRA 313. Make a list of all the chemicals and list what quantity you use per year. Third, publish this list as widely as you can. Put it on your bulletin board. Put it on your Web site. Publish it in your annual stakeholder report. At the top say, “This is a list of chemicals as well as the quantities we used last year that the federal government has listed as toxic and hazardous.” With proper attention, the list should decrease each year.

Do you think that we are asking the impossible of you? You might be saying, “My company is too small for all this attention.” When Joe owned a small soda company, he implemented many of these examples and moved beyond the regulatory requirements. When it came time for Lipton Ice Tea and Sunkist Orange Soda to select a regional manufacturing plant, they selected his. This decision dramatically increased sales and attracted the attention of other opportunities and partnerships.

Some companies’ operations emit dust. Even sewing machines produce airborne lint when the needles pierce a fabric. Some companies making clothes have sewing machines that vacuum the air at the point of contact between the needle and the cloth and send it to a filter. If you produce particulate matter, dust, or lint over a certain threshold, you are required to install a baghouse—a series of filters capturing the particu-lates. But even if you don’t exceed the threshold, there is nothing to stop you from installing a baghouse or other means of capturing airborne particulates and dust generated from your operations.

If your operation involves repeatedly cutting or shredding anything such as wood, cloth, paper, tires, concrete, plastic, or glass, look into technologies to mitigate the production of airborne particles. Particulate matter is also created chemically— for instance, in the reaction of ammonia and NO_x. Look into the use of standalone electrostatic cleaners, negative ion generators, or highefficiency particulate arrestor (HEPA) or submicron air filters or having these installed in your HVAC system as a way of reducing airborne particulate emissions.

At one time, Joe owned an air filtration equipment company. Exercising innovation, he created a number of business opportunities by exposing the risks associated with airborne particulates to potential clients. Once he identified a situation that needed attention (in one example, he demonstrated the risks of airborne formaldehyde in the embalming process in funeral homes), he created a business unit and sold quite a few HEPA air filtration systems. In the same way, strategies for sustaining your own business operations become new business opportunities for yourself and others.

Rule 8—Reduce Solid Waste Through Smarter Consumption

A lot of what we’ve discussed so far are “end-of-pipe” solutions. But there are a host of “beginning-of-pipe” solutions, or methods of reducing pollution by reducing consumption.

We came across an all-you-can-eat sushi bar that created a brilliant way to smartly reduce consumption. It charged customers for any food left on their plates. Other restaurants are offering fantastic specials that you can get only if you preorder them one or two days in advance. Think about just-in-time and other ways to buy only what you need to save money and reduce waste.

As discussed in chapter 5 on green design, people don’t really want a ¼-inch drill bit. They want a ¼-inch hole. What is your real business? What is the result your customer wants accomplished?

In the mail-order business, a company’s or organization’s goal is not to send out the most mailings at the lowest price per mailing. Its goal is to get new customers or members at the lowest cost per acquisition. Rethinking your business in this context generally translates to reductions in waste.

Rule 9—Reuse Whatever You Can

Once an item is manufactured, the longer it lasts, generally the lower its environmental impact. One of the parameters of sustainability is durability. If two vehicles have equal miles-per-gallon ratings but one will last for 100,000 miles and the other 200,000, the one that lasts twice as long generally will have a significantly smaller environmental footprint. Paying 20 percent more for a car or truck tire that lasts twice as long is a good economic and sustainable choice. Whether drill bits and machine tools, manufacturing equipment, or office equipment, buy stuff that is durable so that your cost per year is optimized and your environmental footprint is minimized.

Durability provides for maximizing reuse. As mentioned previously, if you ship to the same customers and receive materials from the same customers, consider investing in reusable shipping containers, from shoebox size cartons to 1-ton totes. You will help the planet and definitely save money.

Eileen Fisher designs and manufactures sophisticated clothing for fashion-conscious professional women. Its garments are increasingly made using sustainable materials and low-impact dyeing processes, and its factories are audited against the Social Accountability International SA 8000 social standard with third-party verification. It recently opened up a unique lab store that sells new and used Eileen Fisher clothing. A reuse program allows customers to return their worn garments. The good-quality returns and samples are then cleaned and refurbished and sold for a fraction of the original price. The profits from the used clothing sales support charitable organizations through the company’s grant-making program. What a brilliant way to add new brandloyal customers at a lower price point while becoming more sustainable by minimizing waste.

TerraCycle makes all of its products from someone else’s waste. It recently started packaging one of its products, a fertilizer made from liquefied castings from worms fed only organic food waste, in used soda bottles. This is the first product to receive the Zerofootprint seal for products that have virtually no negative environmental repercussions.¹²

Rule 10—Recycle and Group the Recyclables

The next chapter deals with using your waste as a feedstock— the ultimate recycling. This section deals with the collection side of the recycling equation. There was a time when employees had a wastebasket under their desk or at their workstation. Then small recycling containers started to be placed next to it. At that time, one often heard reports of the maintenance staff “cheating” by combining the waste from both bins when they were emptied at night, but nonetheless, people began recycling. Then some companies started to put a large recycling container under the desk and a very small waste container. This seemed to work: the smaller the trash container, the more recyclables collected.

In recycling, the more groupings of recyclables, the more valuable the sorted materials. For example, some recycling receptacles encourage the comingling of used office paper, newspapers, magazines, cardboard, and corrugated paper. However, if you separate these materials, they have more value. Are you sorting your solid waste into like groupings? Also, the more recycled material you have in a single category (paper, glass, etc.), the more valuable it is.

In our area, Eric Weiss, chair of the Pioneer Valley Sustainability Network, championed the creation of the Springfield Materials Recycling Facility,¹³ which serves 1 million people in seventy-eight municipalities. It covers the largest geographic area of any single recycling operation in the country. Instead of collectively spending $6 million in tipping charges, these seventy-eight municipalities have their recyclables picked up for no charge—and they receive $1 million for the sale of these materials.

Current prices, down 20–50 percent from before the economic downturn of 2008–2009, are about $1,000 per ton for aluminum, $340 per ton for plastic, $276 per ton for glass, and $126 per ton for paper. No matter how you look at it, recycling makes economic sense. Springfield owns the facility and has been recognized for its leadership in this project, which made it one of the top five green cities in America.¹⁴ The facility is operated by Waste Management Inc.,¹⁵ which processes waste for 20 million customers in the country.

Joe runs CSRwire.com from the offices of the Gasoline Alley Foundation in Springfield. Every day, men push their shopping carts filled with bottles, cans, and metals—anything they can recycle—up the street to recycling facilities. Many of these aspiring entrepreneurs have graduated from shopping carts to small vans and ultimately trucks to collect materials for recycling. From homelessness on the street to a sustainable business with independent living, the recycling business sustains new life.

Some municipalities now even have curbside compost pickup. If you don’t compost on-site you can have food waste; paper napkins, towels, and facial tissue; and grass and yard clippings comingled and composted. Some municipalities pay for the organic material they receive to compost (because it is cheaper to compost than to dispose of in a landfill site). Some municipalities sell or give away the compost they create. Joe has filled his property and grown hundreds of plants with the Springfield compost.

Look at the quantity of cellulosic material (wood, paper, corrugated paper, lint, and rags [cotton and linen]) you can recover from your waste. Consider using this as a solid fuel. It could be both the economically viable and environmentally superior choice. The weight of wood per cord (128 cubic feet) varies but is about 2 tons per cord. If you can get $126 per ton for used paper, that is the equivalent of approximately $250 per cord. If you can get wood for less than $250 per cord, then sell the paper for recycling, but if you can’t get that price for the paper or if cordwood costs more, burn the paper in your solid fuel furnace. Anything that you burn as fuel that comes from plant material within the last few hundred years is considered carbon neutral for purposes of calculating the impact on global warming and has pretty much the same Btu per dry pound as wood. In this way, Waste Management produces power for 1 million people from waste it cleanly burns. Joe burns discarded wood pallets to heat a building that’s used to help sustainable entrepreneurs get started.

Make sure you recycle your used office equipment (computers, printers, monitors, etc.). About 70 percent of the heavy metals in landfills comes from discarded electronics.¹⁶ In 2005 about 2.2 million tons of electronics became obsolete, yet 1.8 million tons were disposed of and only 0.4 million tons were recycled—about 18 percent.¹⁷ Don’t know where to recycle your electronics? Plug into the EPA’s eCycling campaign.¹⁸

Actually, is there anything you have and use in quantity that can’t be recycled? Pallets? Used office furniture? Fry oil? Lubricants? The key to successful recycling is offering whatever you are recycling in quantity and relatively clean. Find a home for everything you have that you don’t use. You may even be able to sell it on Craigslist or to donate it and get a tax deduction.

For example, Rhino Records built its record label on selling recycled hits—songs that used to be number one that no one wanted anymore. In the recording industry, a large number of records are produced, packaged, and shipped in hopes that one will be a hit. For every hit there are too many misses that end up discarded. Rhino’s oldies are goldies.

Summary

This chapter presented a number of examples of zero waste initiatives that illustrate a competitive advantage, promote positive public relations, raise awareness for your company, and create business opportunities for yourself and others. Companies that succeeded at reducing cost-effectively, such as Ecover, Green Festival, and Stonyfield Farm, all created metrics targeting reduction techniques. Remember these rules to successfully reduce, reuse, and recycle:

1. Set a target for reduction. You are likely to hit it.

2. Measure and publish your releases to water, emissions to air, solid waste, and recycling.

3. Set standards as benchmarks for performance.

4. Improve production quality and cleanliness. Reducing defects and waste saves money.

5. Dewater and treat your wastewater.

6. Reuse your gray water, treated wastewater, solvents, and oils.

7. Don’t emit your products or waste products into the air.

8. Reduce solid waste through smarter consumption.

9. Reuse whatever you can.

10. Recycle and group the recyclables. The more groupings of recyclables, the more valuable the sorted materials— and the better the recycling infrastructure to receive the material.

The next chapter will build on the idea of reduction of waste as a solution for turning an environmental problem into a business opportunity. Giving value to that which has been abandoned is the ultimate sustainable enterprise.