Associated for Good

Competitiveness often comes to mind first when describing entrepreneurs, family business owners and corporations. Without question, rigorous competition is part of the recycling industry’s history, but so too is the formation of trade organizations and associations to promote common interests.

Many recycling companies trace their roots back to neighborhood peddlers who collected scrap metal, paper and rags that they knew had resale value.

As these companies grew into businesses that owned property and capital equipment, many of these business owners began to seek access to knowledge and to relationships that could help them build their companies further.

Those desires helped spawn regional, national and global trade associations that now bring together recyclers to share information and to protect their industry from what they consider to be harmful outside influences.

Ideas and Accomplishments
In North America, one of the first known instances of scrap collectors and traders getting together to form a professional association occurred in 1913 when more than three dozen such people gathered in Boston to form the National Association of Waste Material Dealers (NAWMD).

NAWMD, whose members wanted to create specifications for traded materials, was one of several predecessors to what would eventually become the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI). Washington, D.C.-based ISRI, as of 2013, represents some 1,700 companies that process and trade a wide range of metallic and nonmetallic materials.

ISRI did not exist until 1987, when the largely nonferrous (and nonmetallics) National Association of Recycling Industries (NARI) merged with the Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel (ISIS) to form ISRI.

The ISIS timeline dates back to 1928, according to a 1993 article by Kent Kiser in ISRI’s Scrap magazine. In that year, about 20 ferrous scrap processors convened in New York City to start an organization that soon grew to 300 members divided into several regional chapters.

NAWMD, during the years between its founding and the creation of ISRI in 1987, also gained members, added traders of many materials and changed its name to the National Association of Secondary Material Industries (NASMI) before settling on NARI in 1973. In the late 1950s, its paper recycling members adopted the name the Paper Stock Institute (PSI), an acronym that continues as an ISRI chapter to this day.

The movement to merge NARI and ISIS in the 1980s involved negotiation and compromise before being finalized in 1987, with longtime ISIS staff member Herschel Cutler serving as ISRI’s first executive director. The first ISRI convention was in January 1988.

Among ISRI’s first major challenges was providing help to scrap recycling companies being pursued as partially responsible parties (PRPs) by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of its Superfund policy to clean up the nation’s uncontrolled hazardous waste sites.

That cause was aided in 1989 when Robin K. Weiner was hired as ISRI’s director of environmental compliance. With a background as an attorney and engineer, she began advancing ISRI’s position that scrap recyclers had followed all existing laws and acted in good faith when they shipped scrap to smelters or residuals to landfills that later became Superfund sites.

Her work paid off when the Superfund Recycling Equity Act of 1999 (SREA) was signed into law by President Clinton. The legislation helped to distinguish recycling as different from waste disposal in Superfund cases.

The legislative Superfund victory occurred after Weiner was promoted to executive director of ISRI in 1997. Since 2000, she has held the title of president at ISRI.

A major issue also banded together recyclers in Europe in the form of the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR). According to the BIR’s 60th anniversary history, Amsterdam served as the host to a June 1948 meeting between scrap recyclers from five nations (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) who adopted the name Bureau International de la Récupération (BIR).

Scrap processors and traders in Europe at that time were concerned about bans and tariffs that were preventing scrap trading within Europe as well as between Europe and other continents.

The BIR, now based in Brussels, has grown to include 40 national recycling federations representing 70 different nations from Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia.

For half of its 65-year existence, from 1981 to mid-2013, the BIR’s expansion was guided by Secretary General and then Director General Francis Veys, an attorney who joined the BIR staff in 1975.

Diversity Defined
During the 50-year history of Recycling Today magazine, as BIR and ISRI (and its predecessors) were growing, the groups were joined by a long roster of other recycling organizations, many of which were created to meet the needs of new industry niches.

As curbside recycling programs grew in the 1980s and 1990s, many of the people operating or providing services to these programs found a home in the National Recycling Coalition (NRC), which was formed in 1978.

In the 1990s and into the new century, the NRC held sizable meetings and conventions that attracted municipal and county recycling coordinators for workshops, sessions and to browse an exhibit area. The group went through financial difficulties in the late 2000s, closed its Washington, D.C.-area office and laid off its paid staff. It retains a board of directors and an Internet presence that helps state recycling associations communicate with each other.

As curbside recycling grew, solid waste associations such as the Environmental Industry Associations (EIA) and the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) increasingly took positions on recycling-related issues and provided recycling-related services to members.

The sizable scrap generation characterized by demolition activity has been represented since the early 1970s by the National Demolition Association, originally formed as the National Association of Demolition Contractors, Doylestown, Pa.

Construction and demolition materials recyclers also are represented by the recently renamed Construction and Demolition Recycling Association (CDRA), which was formerly the Construction Materials Recycling Association (CMRA).

The International Association of Electronics Recyclers (IAER) began representing electronics recyclers in the 1990s. The IAER was merged into ISRI in 2009.

As plastic recycling began to grow in volume and importance, the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) responded by creating a Recycling Division (now known as the Environmental Division) in 1991.

The roster of national associations past and present is too long to list here, and the task becomes even more enormous when regional and state associations and international associations are included.