In case you missed it: Thoughtful, newsworthy comments from industry professionals, consumers, and legislators.
“We show that if you promote recycling platforms around waste then you will drive consumerism. We can’t recycle our way out of waste. We need change our buying habits to support durable goods, used goods and ideally not buying whatsoever.”
— TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky during a Facebook webinar on the consequences of "voluntary consumerism." Szaky went on to explain how consumers need to understand the benefits of a closed-loop economy and demand durable and reusable products in order for businesses to change the design and manufacturing of such products.
“We don’t need to repeat the mistakes that recycling made. We don’t need to pretend that this is free."
— Casella Resource Solutions Sustainability Manager Abbie Webb during the Northeast Recycling Council's fall conference. Webb and other industry leaders discussed best practices to engage residents and businesses in organics collections, noting that curbside recycling should not be the exact model for these types of programs.
"In spite of the progress achieved in transportation and the built environment, we need to urgently focus on an area that requires an immediate and extensive makeover: our landfills."
— Shift Energy Holdings CTO and renewable energy expert Adrian Tylim in a guest post for Waste Dive. Tylim wrote that, while the U.S. is on a path to reduce emissions more than 25% below the 2005 level by 2025, the industry must look at better practices to reduce the effect of landfills on climate change.
"Our customers have told us that sustainability is important to them, and we believe that it drives profitability and long-term value creation."
— Republic Services CEO Don Slager during the company's recent third quarter earnings call regarding the company's efforts in sustainability. In August the company released its 2015 Sustainability Report which highlighted efforts to reduce fuel emissions and increase recycling, and the company was named to the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index soon after.
"Our bodies are full of potential. We have nutrients in us and there’s no way we should be packed into a box that doesn’t let us go into the earth. Decay and decomposition are amazing processes we are terrified of because they might seem icky and scary — your body aging, your food rotting — but without those processes, we would not be alive."
— Katrina Spade, a Seattle-based designer and founder of the Urban Death Project, in an interview with The Seattle Times. Spade's Urban Death Project aims to turn corpses into compost as an alternative to traditional burial.
"We've been able to draw a clear line in the sand that this is not the way we operate, we don't operate in this fashion, we compete fairly, and it's my goal to continue getting in front of everybody and telling that same story."
— GFL Environmental CEO Patrick Dovigi in an interview with Waste Dive regarding staying positive in light of Rizzo Environmental's recent corruption allegations. As Rizzo's parent company, GFL Environmental is making efforts to quickly rebrand equipment and ensure customer satisfaction in the hopes that municipalities will maintain contracts with the company.