"Much like our employees who are very passionate about the recycling industry and doing what we do every day, the MRC and the players in Michigan who are involved in the recycling industry are very passionate about what we do," Tom Emmerich, COO of Schupan and Sons and president of Schupan Recycling tells Kirk Heinze on Greening of the Great Lakes.
The MRC is the Michigan Recycling Coalition. Emmerich and Heinze spoke at the 2016 Governor's Recycling Summit and MRC Annual Conference.
Education, ease, efficiency, and economically viable markets for the recycled materials are Emmerich's 4 E's of recycling success.
"People need to know what's recyclable and where to go to recycle. It's a challenge for all of us," adds Emmerich.
Next in the recycling industry's continuing evolution in Michigan Emmerich would like to see more "effective, high-quality" curbside recycling programs emerge across the state.
Matt Flechter is the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality's recycling and market development specialist. He joins Emmerich to discuss the robust public/private collaborative effort to address the issue of recycling the many water bottles in Flint.
Flechter says "the number of partners and people interested in making sure there is a solution to this problem has been phenomenal." And he says it's important to have "residents understand that they're part of the recycling system and that their individual actions really do result in positive things for our state."
"As long as people are donating bottles of water to Flint, we need to be doing whatever we can to collect the empty containers for recycling," says Emmerich.
Here in Flint, too, Emmerich is hoping to help bridge the gap between dealing with the bottles today and "a bigger, better, more efficient curbside program and other recycling efforts in the city of Flint."
"I think the future of recycling in Michigan is certainly moving in the right direction. We have a lot of work to do, but we're going to get there," says Emmerich.
Flechter agrees and points to Gov. Snyder's 2014 "Michigan's Residential Recycling Plan," as a key component of growing the recycling industry in our state. Many of the plans key recommendations have already been implemented, including a grants program to spur innovation and market development and educational outreach initiatives featuring the "Michigan Recycles" campaign.
Click here to hear the Emmerich, Flechter, Heinze conversation.
Paul England is Pratt Industries' general manager for Midwest recycling. Pratt is America's fifth largest corrugated packaging company and the world's largest, privately-held 100 percent recycled paper and packaging company.
"At our core, we're actually a corrugated packaging company; we make boxes," says England. "We supply boxes to the Big Three, Home Depot, the U.S. Postal service - the list goes on and on. And we have two, world-class corrugated box plants in Michigan.
"My responsibility is to source nearly two million pounds a year of recycled paper to feed our paper mills. We ship a couple million tons a year into our paper mills, and the mills create rolls of 100 percent recycled paper."
He says the rise in online shopping from places like Amazon has led to an increase in the amount of corrugated material out there that needs to be recycled.
"As an industry, we do just an OK job recovering the materials from the landfill. There's still a tremendous opportunity for improvement with landfill diversion."
According to England, sustainability has always been a core corporate goal at Pratt, a "Triple Bottom Line Sustainability that equals People, Planet and Profit."
Click here to hear the England/Heinze conversation.
Marissa Segundo is a communications consultant for Ann Arbor-based RRS, Resource Recycling Systems, a team of experts in corporate sustainability, waste recovery and organics management.
"RRS helps organizations maximize their waste diversion efforts and ultimately save them money," she says. "We want to get material out of landfills and recycle as much material as possible."
Heinze, White, Segundo
Segundo says what sets apart organizations that recycle well from those that don't is that everyone in the organization has to be on board.
For communities thinking about starting a recycling program, Segundo says "to start in the trash can. Find out what is going into your waste system and what can be taken out. What are the low-hanging fruit we can tackle to make an immediate impact?
"Recycling is a behavior change. So depending on what the culture is in your own house or community, you may have adopted that behavior change. Or you may still need to be taught. And that's where education for recycling is the most important thing we can do.
"The first basic step for a resident who wants to start this behavior change is to check with your municipality or your county and find out what resources are available for recycling, and start recycling and recycling right."
Segundo agrees with Emmerich that recycling has to be easy to be successful.
"And in 2016, recycling couldn't be easier," she says. "We've made it easy, but we still need to make it smart. And there are still rules for recycling. Plastic bags, for example, are not accepted in all communities because they get tangled in the materials processing machinery.
"So you're causing more problems by not following the rules in some cases. Some take foam and some don't. So know the rules in your community."
Click here to hear the Segundo/Heinze conversation.
Katie Fahey is a program administrator for the MRC. She's charged with promoting the Recycle Michigan program Flechter mentioned above.
"We realized we really needed a statewide effort to promote recycling because it does so many good things for our state," she says. "It helps the economy and helps preserve our natural resources."
Fahey says Michigan is the leader in the country in recycling bottles and cans (a lot of that due to our bottle deposit law), "but in everything else, we're actually below the 50 percent mark and are one of the worst recycling states."
She says only 15 percent of Michigan communities have recycling programs. So the Recycle Michigan program hopes to educate more citizens on the benefits of recycling and get that rate up to at least 30 percent.
"If you don't currently have a program in your community, ask your local government why not. It really takes public interest to make recycling work. It takes all of us being interested because if the demand is there, it will happen."
Click here to hear the Fahey/Heinze conversation.
Mary Jo Van Natter is senior municipal sales executive for Sterling Heights-based Rizzo Environmental Services, Michigan's largest privately owned family-based waste and recycling firm.
"Our focus is really on recycling," she says. "We're currently recycling about 6,000 tons a month of single-stream." And they're working to have communities upgrade from recycling bins to the larger recycling carts. Doing so, she says, leads to about a 20 percent increase in recycling.
"We're saving communities money and also expanding their services by going from the bins to the carts."
Within the next few years, Rizzo is hoping to open its own single-stream recycling facility so they can process the material they recycle for the communities with which they work.
Click here to hear the Van Natter/Heinze conversation.