Associations sponsor free webinar on Recycling IQ Kit

The Northeast Recycling Council (NERC), Brattleboro, Vermont, and the Northeast Waste Management Officials’ Association (NEWMOA), Boston, have announced they are co-sponsoring a free webinar April 10, 2018, focused on the Recycling IQ Kit and lessons learned from implementing this initiative.

In 2017 The Recycling Partnership, Falls Church, Virginia, worked in Massachusetts to fight contamination in curbside recycling containers in six communities and trained Bay State staffers to deploy the approach. Together with the Massachusetts Department for Environmental Protection (MassDEP), they created the Recycling IQ Kit to provide cities and towns with steps, tools and resources to help improve the quality of local recycling programs. The kit is an open source and available for any city or town to use at any time.

The toolkit includes:

• guidance for engaging with material recovery facilities (MRFs) and haulers;
• instructions and tools for targeting messages;
• tools for tracking and reporting results;
• customizable artwork for education and outreach; and
• resources for direct feedback at curbside or drop-off.

The April 10 webinar, On the Ground, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. EST, will feature three speakers who have implemented the Recycling IQ Kit in a variety of municipalities and reduced contamination in the municipal recycling stream. The presenters will describe the results for the communities they have worked in and lessons learned as well as providing advice for others.

The presenters are:

• Janice Pare, municipal recycling analyst at MassDEP;
• Marissa Perez-Dormitzer, district recycling coordinator for the city of New Bedford and town of Dartmouth, Massachusetts; and
• Julia Greene, with the city of Lynn, Massachusetts.

The webinar is free, but registration is required. For more information, contact NERC Executive Director Lynn Rubinstein by email at lynn@nerc.org.

NERC is a nonprofit organization that conducts research, projects, training and outreach on issues associated with source reduction, reuse, recycling, composting and environmentally preferable purchasing.

NEWMOA says it is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, interstate association whose membership is composed of the state environment agency programs that address pollution prevention, toxics use reduction, sustainability, materials management, hazardous waste, solid waste, emergency response, waste site cleanup, underground storage tanks and related environmental challenges in the Northeast states.