Environmentalism and Sustainability

A woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty poses on a float full of trash during Earth Day observances in Florida in 1970. (AP Photo)

The entrepreneurs who collect scrap materials have long been part of a supply chain that leads to America’s and the world’s largest manufacturing companies.

During much of recycling’s history, the role of scrap materials was well-known to recyclers themselves and the purchasing agents who directly negotiated with them. Farther up the chain, as metal turns into automobile fenders or pulp into corrugated boxes, the recycling aspect was often ignored or unknown.

In the current century, however, the world’s largest manufacturers and consumer product companies began paying considerably more attention, as their desire to prove they could operate in a sustainable way included acknowledging current recycling practices and seeking out new ones.

The corporate sustainability movement follows several previous decades when groups of people with resource conservation and preservation in mind had become staunch recycling advocates, calling especially for the recycling of highly visible consumer products and packaging.

Bugged by Litter
When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in 1970, it was a response to many events and circumstances involving air and water pollution and roadside trash and illegal dumping.

Environmental advocates who wanted to see litter-free landscapes were not necessarily enamored by the thought of all that trash continuing to head to landfills. Knowing that the recycling of some basic materials was not only possible but commercially established, recycling advocacy became a plank in the environmentalist platform.

The EPA’s creation also coincided with the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, when fairs and get-togethers held throughout the United States included antilitter and pro-recycling messages and information.

Within the newly established EPA was an Office of Solid Waste, created in part to support further research and funding for recycling. The office’s creation was made possible by the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, designed to create a mechanism for landfill diversion and recycling research.

The amount of recycling funding that has flowed through federal, state and local government channels has ebbed and flowed throughout the past 40 years. During peak funding years, however, taxpayer dollars helped create the municipal recycling collection, sorting and processing services that have led to much higher recycling rates for postconsumer newspaper, cans and bottles now compared with when Recycling Today magazine was started (as Secondary Raw Materials) in 1963.

As one yardstick, the paper and paperboard recycling rate in the U.S. jumped from 15 percent in 1970 to 62 percent in 2009. Plastic beverage containers were not even on the shelf in 1970, but now some 1.6 billion pounds of such bottles are recycled each year in the U.S.

This progress was achieved slowly through milestones such as the first “bottle bill,” passed by Oregon in 1972, and California’s bottle bill, passed in 1986.

Creating momentum for bottle bills or local recycling programs often entailed considerable grassroots campaigning and activism, whether by national organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, the National Recycling Coalition or, later, the Grassroots Recycling Network.

The postconsumer recycling infrastructure championed by these recycling advocates not only diverts millions of tons of materials from landfills each year, it also contributes to the profitability of numerous companies and provides tens of thousands of jobs.

The Bottom Line
As industrial and postconsumer recycling have grown since the 1970s, recycling’s reputation as an altruistic but economically unimportant activity has been reshaped.

Publicly owned, multinational corporations are at times accused of chasing after a positive environmental image without necessarily making genuine commitments to sound practices.

Whether motivated by this quest for a good image or for additional (ideally more fundamental) reasons, corporate sustainability reports have become a way for companies to offer proof of their commitment.

Sustainability can be defined many ways, but recycling has proven to be one of the most commonly practiced and referenced aspects of corporate sustainability.

As basic materials have gained or held their value throughout this century, manufacturers have proven much more willing to purchase and use secondary materials.

Companies such as General Motors (GM), Ford Motor Co., Boeing and aluminum producer Novelis are among those paying much greater attention to how to efficiently source secondary materials. In the case of mass-production vehicle makers such as GM and Ford, this means their first- and second-tier suppliers also become attuned to recycled materials.

Wal-Mart is among the major retailers setting aggressive landfill diversion and recycling goals, having determined that recycling often makes more sense than paying to dispose of discarded materials.

Recycling is a cyclical business, withprogress often followed by a setback. However, a combination of grassroots activism and corporate evaluation of how discarded materials are handled has helped establish a recycling infrastructure that will be difficult and impractical to dismantle.