Certifying an alliance

Earlier this year, the Recycling Industry Operating Standard (RIOS), which is managed by the Global Recycling Standards Organization (GRSO), formed an alliance with the Responsible Recycling (R2) certification program, which is developed and managed by SERI, Hastings, Minnesota. The new alliance is designed to facilitate collaboration to improve training and education programs, streamline the process for companies seeking R2 and RIOS certifications, lower the overall cost of certification and support responsible recycling, reuse and repair of electronics.

Recycling Today connected with Darrell, Kendall, executive director of RIOS, and Corey Dehmey, executive director of SERI, to learn more about how the alliance benefits recyclers.

Recycling Today (RT): What was the thought process behind forming an alliance between RIOS and R2?

Darrell Kendall (DK): So, we understand that the whole certification process, particularly in electronics, can be very costly and challenging. So, Corey, the executive director of R2, and I got together fairly early on in the development of R2 Version 3 and talked about what we could do to make the certification experience less burdensome on recyclers. We started working through some of this, coming up with some ideas on what we could do to formalize a partnership. It’s all about making certification more accessible, more affordable, easier to obtain and finding ways to work together as organizations to provide as much support to recyclers as we can.

Corey Dehmey (CD): So, the thought process was about how can we bring more resources to the table to help recyclers achieve R2 certification? R2 requires a foundation of a management system. So, if you are R2 certified, you also have to be certified to environmental, health and safety standard. The choices [for that] are ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 or RIOS. So, it’s important to the process. From my own experience, I’m an IT (information technology) guy, and 12 years ago I stepped into a role where I had to figure out how do we do this. My own experience with RIOS was a big help to me in learning how to build a management system and be able to get certified. So, the thinking that goes into this is how can we provide more resources to those organizations trying to get certified and how can we make the process more efficient and affordable? The opportunity was to collaborate and figure out ways to make it more achievable, especially for small businesses.

RT: What are some challenges recyclers face with achieving R2 or RIOS certification?

DK: I think anytime with certification or anytime you talk about compliance, the immediate response is it’s expensive and tough. Big companies that have 300 or 500 staff members and have a compliance team, it’s easier to take care of certification. But for some recyclers that are 15 employees or maybe a nonprofit just trying to help schools get access to equipment and you’re asking them to get R2 and part of R2 means you need to have environmental, health and safety certification—you need either RIOS, ISO 14001 or 45001—and with R2v3 if you are a refurbisher, you need ISO 9001 on top of it.

CD: Knowledge of what to do and how to do it. RIOS has an implementation guide, which is a step-by-step, do-it-yourself approach. Making that affordable and attainable is a big step to helping people understand how to actually do this. RIOS agreed to make the standard available freely so people can read it before they buy it. Even with ISO standards, you have to pay to download it before you read the whole thing. The R2 standard is freely available. We wanted the same for the environmental, health and safety piece required within R2. We’re making that available through this arrangement.

RT: Has anything changed with the certification process for RIOS or R2 with the new alliance?

DK: We’re still two separate organizations that operate independently. We just have decided that we will work together. When someone calls someone from R2 and asks to get certified, they talk to us at RIOS separately still. But we’re empowering each other to have conversations, so that way people get a more streamlined experience. The other big thing financially is we’ve made RIOS available to anybody pursuing or certified to R2. It’s available at an affiliate member rate or association rate. We’ve agreed as part of this alliance to make RIOS available to anyone doing R2 at the lowest tier with the intention of lowering the cost and barrier to entry.

I think the big takeaway is that we want recyclers to know about the alliance, and the big keys are that this doesn’t mean the organizations merged. They are still separate. Our goal is to make the certification experience as painless as possible, recognizing that it is a burdensome process. Our goal is to make it less difficult, less expensive and have a better impact on bottom lines.

CD: This is to help more people out—spread the knowledge, spread the best practices and help us all toward achieving a sustainable world. That’s the end goal here. This is the beginning of a collaboration. We are looking and working toward many more opportunities to help the world, the process and the industry reach these goals.