Waste Away Group Blog
When we were in high school and asked the question, “When am I ever going to use this again?”, we heard that we would need that math somewhere in our lives...but who would have thought it would be for recycling? Numbers, triangles, densities...what do all of these mean? Well, it’s not really math, and not as difficult as it sounds.
“Recycling one plastic bottle can save enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for six hours”.* Imagine how much energy Americans could save if every one of the estimated 30 to 50 billion water bottles that are thrown away each year were recycled! Although it seems impractical to think that every one of them would be recycled, if even half of them wound up in the recycling bin instead of the landfill, it would impact the United States greatly.
Really, what or who is an expert on anything? Generally defined, an expert is a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience or occupation in a particular field or area of study. Having prolonged and intense experience through practice and education, the expert judges and decides rightly, justly or wisely. Okay, I suppose it’s hard to argue with that, but can that “extensive knowledge and prolonged & intense experience be quantified? According to Malcolm Gladwell’s essay, “Outliers,” it can be. You may remember those three words that every baseball coach and piano teacher recited, “practice, practice, practice.” Gladwell agrees. In fact, he suggests it takes 10,000 hours of practice to make an expert.
It is unbelievable how much trash Americans generate through the course of a week. Estimates are that “1,600 pounds is the amount of trash the average American produces annually. With the garbage produced in America alone, you could form a line of filled-up garbage trucks that would reach the moon”.* As astonishing as this number is, it’s just the tip of the iceberg since today’s fast-paced culture perpetuates the problem with readily available, pre-packaged everything! In fact, speaking of packaging, “72 million tons of containers and packaging in 2009 ended up in the U.S. municipal solid waste stream or MSW. Packaging makes up 30 percent of America's trash — the largest portion of MSW generated”.* Packaging....or rather over-packaging, seems to be an even more difficult problem when several types of packaging are not even recyclable by conventional means.
On a day like any other day in Customer Support, a co-worker took a call from a potential customer who eventually signed up for new residential trash service with Borden Waste-Away. She ultimately called three times that day; once to ask questions and inquire about service options, once to tell us of her decision to sign up for service, and a final time to ask a couple forgotten questions about the service she had chosen. During the third conversation with one of our Customer Support Representatives (CSR), she asked, “Do you know why I went with your service”? The CSR paused for a moment and she plainly stated...”Because I made 9 phone calls to different companies today and you are the only one who answered the phone. I called you 3 times, and every time someone answered the phone”. Our CSR went on to explain that, as long as it is during our business hours, you will always reach a live person.
Have you ever heard the sayings, “Think Global-Act Local” or “Buy Local-Be Local”?. How about the newly-coined term “Livin’ La Vida LocalTM? These sayings, although some of them cliche, pack more of a punch than we realize. Local economy is driven, survives, and thrives if we feed it through purchases we make for goods and services. The spending decisions we make every day can literally control local economy in a way some of us have never imagined. In fact, “if half the employed population spent $50 each month in locally owned independent businesses, it would generate more than $42.6 billion in revenue”*
Can you spot the recycling in this trash container? Well, not only is it in there, but it’s staying in there. I mean, is it possible that a trash truck can compact several hundred pounds of waste material, dump it at a transfer station, take perfectly clean, untorn recycling bags out of it, and send it to a materials recycling facility (MRF) for use in manufacturing other products? It’s possible...but not very probable. Statistics show that this method of taking recycling materials mixed with trash to a dirty MRF for separation and eventual processing at a recycling facility can have very poor results.
Based on the NAID certification requirements for media endorsement, including hard drive destruction, Integra must have a written and verifiable process for the physical destruction of conventional computer hard drives which render them unreadable and
unreconstructable, and we do. We first record and retain the serial numbers of all the hard drives being destroyed for each client and provide the client with printed materials of our procedures and methods as well as certifications of destructions.
Recycling has been around in some form as long as any of us can remember. We took glass and plastic bottles back to the grocery store for the deposit and we collected aluminum cans to take to the scrap yard for a little pocket change. We even understood the importance of repurposing items for other uses than their original intended use, which is why most of our parents had a bird feeder made from an old milk jug or a paper mache picture frame made from popsicle sticks and newspapers.
When it comes to the proper way to destroy a document, size matters! When you see the next Integra truck roll by, take a note of the AAA certification logo. This top level NAID endorsement is not only highly regarded, but it must be earned and requires diligent effort to maintain. And, to keep this rating, our destruction process and audit methodology must prove that our shredded particle size meets or exceeds the certification specifications produced by the commercial grade destruction equipment we use in our trucks and at our plant.
And we do!