Tag: Local


Recycling Providers: Local Startup vs. National Goliath

30
March

This article is cross-posted on Triple Pundit.

The Green Committee, which I founded and lead at my company, has been developing an initiative for Zero Waste. Today I met with our building’s facilities manager to discuss the partnership I have forged with EcoMovement Consulting & Hauling. They are a local company who will soon collect our recyclables and compost – a move that excites me to no end – making our company’s facility the first large office building in coastal NH to pursue Zero Waste by “reducing and reusing, then composting and recycling what’s left.”

Our facilities manager told me that she just launched a single stream program with Waste Management at one of the other buildings her company manages. She said if all goes well, in a few months Waste Management will be contracted to pick up my company’s recycling as well. She was happy to tell me that EcoMovement could still collect our compost and went on to explain that for her it would be much easier to have one vendor provide hauling services to the several dozen properties she oversees.

I suddenly saw the position she was in and wondered what I would do. I had specifically sought alternatives to Waste Management when creating our Zero Waste program. If I was managing multiple locations, would I continue to follow my strong inclination to support local vendors or would I instead employ the national company that I had been using for years?

The complexity of any project increases when more stakeholders are involved. Finding a vendor that provides enterprise-wide service reduces logistics, contracts, and cost. But with size comes limitations and, sometimes, with experience comes lack of innovation. In this case the local startup would have my business over the national Goliath. Here’s why.

The primary reason I would choose to work with EcoMovement over Waste Management is for the breadth of services they offer. EcoMovement is a zero waste enabling organization that actually began as a sustainability consulting firm. They morphed into a hauling company when they saw the need for better waste management in Portsmouth, NH, and kept their educational philosophy with them.

EcoMovement prides itself on working with its clients to develop an implementation plan that will ensure the customer’s employees adopt the Zero Waste program. They offers signage and guidelines to educate people on what to recycle in which bin and how composting works. After enabling their clients to build a strong framework for pursuing Zero Waste, EcoMovement steps back and encourages each company to strive for Zero Waste in their own way. Their website boasts photos of end users expressing their interest in working toward minimal trash generation and a video that highlights some of EcoMovement’s local partners.  The owners of this startup take their work so seriously that if on pick up day they notice one company’s trash tote contains recyclables, they make sure to speak with the managers to see how they can help develop additional methods to support employees’ efforts to achieve Zero Waste.

The second reason for my choosing the local vendor is that Waste Management does not use dedicated recycling centers, locations that specialize in recovering recyclable items. This means that some of the paper, plastics, and aluminum they collect goes into landfills. Even if this practice only happens occasionally, which is what my facilities manager told me, I believe that is too often. The problem is that Waste Management has not invested in enough recycling centers and putting the recyclables their clients have taken the time to rinse and sort in with the rest of the trash is not acceptable. If Waste Management tells clients they can collect recyclables, they need to ensure these items are indeed recycled. EcoMovement brings their non-compostable material to the dedicated recycling facility in southern Maine where it is properly recycled 100 percent of the time and the compost to their own compost facility in NH.

Finally, while Waste Management invested in national compost facilities expert Harvest Power in early 2010, they do not appear to collect compost at this point in time. My organization began recycling when the Green Committee was launched in mid-2007 and pursuing Zero Waste has been a discussion for at least the past eighteen months. To work with a vendor that allows us to compost enables us take the next step on our sustainability journey.

It would most likely take a full year to transition dozens of properties from Waste Management to EcoMovement or a similar, local based and highly dedicated recycling company. I am confident that after twelve months, the process of adopting Zero Waste or single stream would be much further along using a vendor that offers implementation planning and recycling education as part of its services. In the end, each employee will make the decision to recycle and compost or not but rolling out a program designed to engage workers gives the entire project a much better chance for success. As my team gears up for the launch of our Zero Waste initiative, we are making sure to keep engagement a top priority. I am very interested in seeing how our program is accepted and internalized when it is rolled out on April 22, 2011 and I’ll write another article letting you all know how it goes.

Comment » | Green Committee, Local, Recycling, Sustainability

FOOD Inc. Shows That Consumers Can Change Corporations

14
October

2538540022_6e5c05990c_tI just returned from seeing FOOD Inc., a new documentary about the industrialization of the American food industry. I knew the basic message would revolve around how distant we as a nation have become from the food we consume. I also had a feeling that Monsanto and their evil seed empire would make an appearance. What I was not expecting was to learn so much about how the incredible quantity of meat we eat in our country is supplied. I was also surprised to hear that the rise of fast food created a demand for cheap ingredients and helped spur the growth of the modern day corporate farm.

When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, his infamous expose of the meat industry in the early 1900s,  his words shed light on both the unsanitary processing facilities as well as the exploitation of immigrant workers in the meat factories of Chicago. The public was outraged and demanded safer meat, a bit ironic because Sinclair had hoped to raise awareness of the dangerous working conditions. The Pure Food Act of 1906 and the Meat Inspection Act gave people safer meat and workers better conditions. Evidently these changes, and others that followed, were effective, for being a meat packer became a well-paid and respected position by the 1950s, in line with the often venerated American autoworker. This is in stark contrast to today’s meat plants, which are among the most dangerous places to work in the US. So what happened? Among other reasons, FOOD Inc. says, McDonald’s happened.

By getting rid of its waitresses and turning their kitchen into an assembly line, McDonald’s developed the foundation for the modern day industrial food company. People were trained to perform the same job over and over and over again. They were treated as machines, paid a low wage, and disposed of at will because other workers were readily available to take their place. As fast food grew, McDonald’s needed larger and larger quantities of meat, potatoes, chicken, lettuce, etc. They demanded that farmers ensure consistent quality in their products while at the same time decreasing their cost. How were the farmers of the 1950 and 1960s able to meet this demand? They were not and the corporate farm was born.

According to the movie, in the 1970s, the top four beef producers made up approximately 20% of the industry. Today, they account for almost 80%. The US has gone from having hundreds of slaughter houses to only thirteen major factories that process beef. Not only are the cows being kept in high density feedlots, they are being feed a diet of corn instead of what ruminants typically eat, grass. Corn is used because its production is heavily subsidized by the federal government and the cost to ranchers is actually below the cost of production. It also makes the cows grow larger and fatter.

The corn produces an unnatural environment in the cow rumination chamber and encourages the growth of harmful e-coli. Reports of e-coli tainted meat increased throughout the 1990s and we have even seen other crops, such as spinach and peanuts, become infected over the last few years. E-coli outbreaks have killed multiple people, one of the most notable of which was a 2 1/2 year old boy who died twelve days after eating an infected hamburger while on vacation with his family. This tragedy was the impetus for Kevin’s Law, a food safety bill that has been bounced around Capital Hill for almost a decade but has yet to find its way into law.

Despite a fair amount of doom and gloom concerning the current state of our food system, FOOD Inc. offers a strong sense that this madness can be stopped. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia is an honest, humble, and insightful spokesperson for a farming system that treats animals as living beings and rewards small scale agriculture with fresh, nutrient packed, and delicious food. The audience clapped when he mused about what happens to people who treat cattle, chickens, and pigs as if they were only a raw material. He wondered how we will treat our neighbors, our community, and the rest of the world if we can’t treat our food and the people who raise and process it with respect.

After the movie ended and the house lights came on, I left the Portsmouth Music Hall thinking about what Gary Hirshberg, CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm, said near the end of the film about the power of consumers. He assured us that companies will do what we as consumers want. When Wal-Mart customers showed a preference for milk free of rGBH, an artificial growth hormone, the company switched to non-rGBH milk. This has more or less “nailed the coffin” on rGBH because of Wal-Mart’s tremendous buying power.

Each time we buy an item at the grocery store or the farmers market, we are sending a message to the food industry. Companies spend millions of dollars every year to find out what consumers want. Let’s make sure to tell them we need local food grown and raised with care on organic farms. And this food will taste even better when we know our choices are changing the way the modern way farms operate.

1 comment » | food, Green, Local, Organic, Sustainability

     

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