I never thought I would look at so much trash!

Hey guys, you're back!

Today I am going to talk about trash. Mainly how to keep it out of the recycling!

Throughout my time at Resource Recovery, I had the opportunity to work with David Bordieri, the Waste Prevention Coordinator. One of the many hats that David wears here at RIRRC is providing free waste assessments to commercial entities. These assessments can vary greatly in place and kind. Meaning, they are offered to companies to schools to universities to churches and they can be completely starting from scratch all the way to finding ways to improve an already thriving recycling program. I had the opportunity to see these two very polar opposite situations within school settings and an example of a large business wanting to improve upon their existing recycling program.

The first being in the Cumberland School Department. David and myself went on assessments at the high school and one of the middle schools after a student had contacted RIRRC as part of a project to see how she could go about improving recycling throughout the district. Upon assessment of both of these schools, the recycling programs were thriving! The majority of students seemed to already be recycling the acceptable items. There biggest area for improvement was to add more recycling carts in the cafeteria (1 recycling cart for every trash bin), as well as add the RIRRC Recycling Across America labels to every recycling bin and cart to promote awareness to students. These labels, with some posters would help to remind the students of what is an acceptable recyclable material.

A recycling bin with RIRRC's Recycle Across America label

About two weeks after the Cumberland school visits, David and myself went on an assessment of a private school in Portsmouth, RI. In this instance, an educator had contacted us to start a recycling program from the ground up. We talked to her about all of the steps that this would entail, which includes: talking to their current waste hauler about adding a recycling service (if possible) and if they are unable to, the school would have to find a separate hauler for recycling, the school would have to purchase all of the recycling bins and carts (finding grants or doing a fundraiser if necessary) and the largest piece of the puzzle would be to educate the students and staff. I wrote up a report detailing all of this and if all goes well, the school could potentially be recycling by next year!

To show me what a recycling program looks like in a large company, David took me to FM Global in Johnston.Our visit was planned to talk about how they could improve the recycling program that they already had in place. Their current program includes separating cardboard and paper from the rest of the mixed recycling stream, however, their hauler now requires the paper to be separated from the cardboard. This makes the process more complicated, which is why they reached out to RIRRC. We discussed the fact that switching over to a strictly mixed recycling stream would make the most sense. From this discussion, we moved onto a tour where we looked at what they had for recycling carts and dumpsters. This tour brought up the discussion of what products they use in the cafeteria and which would be the best for the environment. As they were already purchasing the compostable cups and take out food containers, making it more a decision of what is more practical for them instead of what it would cost.

These waste assessment visits were so valuable to expanding my knowledge about waste and recycling disposal. I learned more and more with every visit, gaining my confidence with each one!