4. Under the current system there is a lack of
incentive to design better products
there is no cost to
business to continue to
throw away more and
more material
there are no incentives
to create products that
last longer or are
more easily recycled
Currently many goods are designed to be
obsolete in just a few years.
5. We dispose of a lot of stuff…
…each year Americans throw away about
1,600 pounds of trash, much of it products
and packaging!
4.4 lbs/day
29 lbs/week
1,600 lbs/year
6. That means by age 25 you’ve
thrown away …
40,000 pounds
7. Photo courtesy: George Hall
By the time you’re 50 you’ve thrown away 80,000 pounds –
or the weight of a Boeing 737
And that’s just one person!
8. Many of the
products we use,
and their
packaging,
impact the
environment and
our health in
unintended ways
10. Today, we look to local
governments to manage this
increasingly complex waste
stream.
11. The amount of waste generated has
continued to rise & the costs of waste
management continue to rise with it!
Source: US EPA
12. Local governments are responsible for
dealing with any and all waste that comes
their way.
They have no control over:
- the quantity of waste
- or the materials
13. Taxpayer dollars are spent to clean up the mess
Either picking up goods
that have been illegally
discarded
Or through environmental remediation needed to
remove the toxic substances from our drinking
water and soils
16. Product Stewardship directs all
those involved in the life cycle of a product
to take responsibility for the impacts to our
health and the natural environment that
result from the production, use, and end-
of-life management of the product.
18. Product Stewardship means looking at
the impact of a product:
from the time it
is raw materials
until it is
discarded
Raw
Materials
Manufacturing
Transportation
Retail Use Disposal
19. …everyone has a role to play
from those who
make it
to those
who sell
it
to
those
who
buy it
Producers
Distributors
Retailers
Consumers
Waste Management
Responsibility:
To produce goods that
are safe for their
customers & the
environment
20. …everyone has a role to play
from those who
make it
to those
who sell
it
to
those
who
buy it
Producers
Distributors
Retailers
Consumers
Waste Management
Retailers and other businesses have a
unique ability to educate their
customers and their suppliers about
opportunities to reduce unintended
environmental and health impacts
from their products, and to help
provide solutions for collection and
recycling.
21. …everyone has a role to play
from those who
make it
to those
who sell
it to
those
who
buy it
Producers
Distributors
Retailers
Consumers
Waste Management
Responsibility:
-Buy and use the best product
-Dispose or recycle all goods responsibly
22. How do we start?
Batteries
Carpet
Electronics
Fluorescent Lighting
Gas Cylinders
Medical Sharps
Mercury Products
Thermostats
Packaging
Paint
Pesticides
Pharmaceuticals
Phone books
Radioactive Devices
Tires
23. Thermostats
PROBLEM: Toxic Mercury
Average thermostat contains 4 grams of mercury
In 1994, there were approximately 63 million mercury
thermostats in use within the residential sector alone,
equal to about 277 tons of mercury.
Expansion of Thermostat Recycling Corp. program to:
• chain wholesalers, heating and cooling contractors,
HHW facilities, retailers
15 states now have laws that ban or restrict the sale of
mercury thermostats.
Potential Benefit: More than $267,000 PER YEAR in direct
savings or service benefit for Nebraska.
24. PROBLEM: Toxic metals, pollute soil & water
3 Billion sold annually
Only 10-12% of rechargeable batteries are
recycled.
Even fewer single use batteries are recycled.
Potential Benefit: More than $1.8 million PER
YEAR in direct savings or service benefit for
Nebraska.
Batteries
25. PROBLEM: Excessive Waste
10% of paint sales becomes leftover
(2006 = 75 million gallons in the U.S.)
$640 million dollars/yr mgt cost
(avg. cost: $8/liquid gallon)
Potential Benefit: More than $3.5 million PER
YEAR in direct savings or service benefit for
Nebraska.
Paint
26. PROBLEM: Toxic Mercury
Environmentally sound in that they last longer and use
just a fraction of the energy of incandescent bulbs.
More than ½ billion fluorescent bulbs sold annually.
Potential Benefit: Nearly $500,000 PER YEAR in direct
savings or service benefit for Nebraska.
Fluorescent Lamps
27. Pesticides
PROBLEM: Environmental Impacts
Risk to human health.
High cost to collect.
U.S. pesticide expenditures totaled more
than $11 billion in 2000 and 2001
Potential Benefit: More than $2.2 million
PER YEAR in direct savings or service
benefit for Nebraska.
28. PROBLEM: Injury during disposal, transmission of
disease.
Estimated that over 3 billion disposable needles and
syringes, and an additional 900 million lancets
enter the municipal solid waste stream each year in
the U.S.
Sources:
Those managing their own healthcare.
Intravenous drug users.
Potential Benefit: More than $1.1 million PER YEAR in
direct savings or service benefit for Nebraska.
Medical Sharps
29. Electronics
Cell phones, computers, music players
(ipods), blue tooth, lap tops, etc.
23 state electronics laws
Manufacturer and retailer take-back
programs in response to dialogue (e.g.
Staples, Best Buy, HP, Dell, LG, etc.)
Potential Benefit: More than $3.7 million
PER YEAR in direct savings or service
benefit for Nebraska.
PROBLEM: Toxic Materials
30. PROBLEM: Unnecessary Waste
660,000 tons of waste/year
Voluntary industry guidelines developed
• Opt out
• Recycling
• Sustainable production
90% of publishers now with opt out program
Potential Benefit: More than $230,000 PER YEAR
in direct savings or service benefit for
Nebraska.
Phone Books
32. Call2Recycle
In this program
individual battery
manufacturers pay a
license fee to
Call2Recycle
Then Call2Recycle
handles all the
administration & pays
all costs associated with
collecting & recycling
batteries
MFG License fee
• retail locations
serve as collection
points at no cost
to them
Batteries are recycled!
www.call2recycle.com
33. Customer
purchases CFL
in a hardware
store
CFL bulb is
used at home
Stores collects
bulbs & sends
them to a
recycling facility
Recovered
materials can
make new bulbs
Used bulbs can
be returned to
any store that
collects them
1 2 43 5
Current Cities
Broken Bow Chadron Grand Island Hastings
Hebron Kearney La Vista Lincoln
Nelson North Platte Omaha Ogallala
Red Cloud Superior
34. Product Stewardship
The Basic Concept.
• Shared responsibility.
• The greater the ability, the greater the
responsibility.
• All costs should be included.
• The costs of product manufacture
should be minimized.
• Financial incentive for manufacturers.
35. The Basic Concept.
• Flexibility in determining how to
address impacts.
• Performance measured by results.
• Incentives for “cleaner”
• Incentives for end-of-live system
• In realizing these principles, industry
will need to provide leadership.
• Government leadership
• Industry and government education
36. Product Stewardship doesn’t necessarily change the
way consumers handle their goods when they no
longer need them and it doesn’t necessarily require
an entirely new infrastructure.
Many Product Stewardship programs
will continue to use existing collection
infrastructure.
Product Stewardship shifts waste
management costs from the public to
the private sector
37. Nebraska’s Foundation
• Not full product stewardship
• Financial burden on tax payers
• Infrastructure for future product
stewardship programs
• Nebraska is putting the pieces together
• National voluntary product stewardship
programs
40. Who makes product stewardship
happen?
Businesses
Local governments
State governments
Environmental/health
organizations
Other institutions
41. What can you do now?
1. Take advantage of voluntary programs that
already exist
2. Urge major retailers who have take-back
programs in other parts of the country to
start one where you live
42. 3. Be a responsible consumer
A. Buy Better Products
o Buy goods that are durable
o Buy used when possible
o Look for environmentally preferable goods
• That don’t contain toxins
• Are made from recycled materials
B. When you are finished:
o Resell
o Reuse
o Recycle
o Or safely dispose of your goods
44. CFL bulb recycling with partnerships at various hardware and home improvement
stores throughout Nebraska.
Grant funding to communities & businesses to facility electronic waste collections.
Battery Recycling: Pre-paid and pre-addressed collection boxes
for battery shipments to the Rechargeable Battery Recycling
Corporation.
Cell Phone Recycling: Collecting cell phones through a
partnership with Wireless Alliance
45. Construction & Demolition Waste Management: Assist with
construction waste management plans, tracking materials
recycled, and identifying service providers. Research and
development to achieve LEED status.
Finishing Technologies: Hands-on training system intended to instruct
members of the surface coating industry using state-of-the-art virtual
reality technology.
Waste Assessments: A non-regulatory overview of a business’
volume of waste produced. Sustainability planning services which
would include a broader look at all aspects of the company.
46. Curb Side Recycling: Through Recycling Enterprises,
members of WasteCap Nebraska can offer discounted home
recycling services to their employees living within the service
area.
Green Team Roundtables: Networking and educational opportunities for
businesses interested in starting a green team, expanding the projects of the
green teams or just have an interest in using green principles.
Green Ambassadors: Speakers bureau aimed at educating Nebraska’s
business leaders on product stewardship and the services of WasteCap
Nebraska.
Service Directory: A directory of recycling service providers and
business/non-profits who reuse materials. Available in book form and on
the WasteCap Nebraska website.
47. You are invited to become a member of WasteCap
Nebraska today. As a member, you can enjoy all of the
service benefits previously listed, plus numerous
educational and networking opportunities throughout
the year.
Plus you become a part of helping Nebraska
businesses practice and develop product stewardship.
Ask for your membership application today!
49. How to Start Today!
Call your local & state representatives
Start small with your Product Stewardship
program
Be an “Another Bright Idea” collection
point
Be a “Call to Recycle” collection point
Ask your local municipality to have a
collection event (E-Scrap)
Ask your favorite retailers to start product
stewardship programs
{Customize this for your presentation} Thank you. My name is ______________________. I am a Green Ambassador with WasteCap Nebraska. The Green Ambassadors is a speakers bureau program utilizing college interns to present information to Nebraska business leaders. I would like to thank __________________________ for allowing me to present my information today. I am a student attending ___________________________ majoring in ____________________. I plan to graduate in ____________________ and am looking for a career in _________________. Before we begin, I do need to ask you to help me out. Since this program is grant funded, it is important that we keep an accurate record of where we’ve been and who we’ve spoken to. I have a form here that I’ll pass around. Please place your name on it. I have a few requirements to meet, including presenting to a minimum number of people. So, it’s very important that you sign your name for me. If you want more information about any of our programs you can place a check mark on the sheet now, or just let me know after the program. I also need to ask you to complete this evaluation of my talk today. Again this is for grant reporting purposes. You don’t need to place your name on it, but please do complete it and leave it at your setting for me to pick up when we’re through today.Let’s go ahead and get started with this program.
I’d like to thank the Product Stewardship Institute for helping me with the information for this presentation today. If you’d like to learn more about the Product Stewardship Institute, please feel free to visit their website at www.productstewardship.us
Every day each of us uses hundreds of products. Let’s just think about the products we have touched since we’ve been in this room together today. {name a few of the products}
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average American produces about 4.4 pounds (2 kg) of garbage a day, or a total of 29 pounds (13 kg) per week and 1,600 pounds (726 kg) a year. All this trash adds up.
If each of us produces 1600 pounds of trash each year, that means by the time we’re 25 – which isn’t very old – we’ve produced 40,000 pounds of trash. Can you imagine 40,000 pounds of trash in your back yard?
Is anyone in here 50 years old? Been on a plane lately? Imagine all that in trash. And now imagine O’Hare, Kennedy, or any other major airport and the heaping piles of trash we produce.
Part of theproblem is that all these products and their packaging can impact the environment and our health in unintended ways. When you throw away a wrapper, you don’t think about where it goes beyond the trash bin.
But some products contain toxins that can be unintentionally released into our environment. Lead, mercury, cadmium, lithium, flame retardants, special coatings, gases, and other toxins can escape as these products are crushed or slowing break down in our landfills. Once this happens, these toxins can get into our soil, water system, and even into our own bodies.
We have a growing problem with waste. Not only are more people in Nebraska producing waste, but each individual is also producing more waste. In 1960 each person was producing 2.68 pounds of waste per day, but in 2008 that number has grown to 4.5 pounds per day. And now multiply that by each person in this room, in this town, and in this STATE!
Our landfills are most often owned and operated by our local governments. But they have no control over the type of waste that is coming in or how much. And when there are restrictions, people have no place to put their unwanted items.
So, they often are left to sit in storage, left for new property owners to figure out, or worse, are dumped illegally. This clean-up costs tax payers even more money.
So what do we do? Where do we go from here?
This is where Product Stewardship comes in. Product Stewardshiplooks at everyone who is involved in a products life cycle and directs responsibility to each of them.
It specifically looks at those who design, make, and sell the products we use. Product stewardship moves the responsibility off us as individuals and off our municipalities.
This may seem like an overwhelming project, and we need to know where to start. The Product Stewardship Institute has identified these products as the place to start. They’ve chosen these items based on several factors including their harmful effects on the environment and to humans and the quantity of items disposed of. Let’s review some of these items to get a better understanding of the problem.
Pesticides can pose risks to human health and the environment, and they are used and disposed of in significant quantities. Currently, there is a lack of collection programs due to the high costs of collection and the lack of funding. There are numerous opportunities for pesticide manufacturers, retailers, and other industry stakeholders to join with government officials to reduce the impacts from pesticide manufacture, use, storage, and disposal.
Nebraska has already begun the product stewardship movement. Here are a couple of examples.
Call 2 Recycle is a battery recycling program that was actually started by the battery manufacturing industry. Manufacturers pay a licensing fee to Call2Recycle. Call2Recycle works with local retailers to serve as collection points. Consumers can return their spent rechargeable batteries and cell phones to the retail location and then Call2Recycle will pick those batteries up and recycle them. This prevents batteries from entering our landfills and puts them to good use! It costs nothing to the retailer or the consumer to recycle these batteries.
Another Bright Idea is a WasteCap Nebraska program. WasteCap works with local retailers, mostly hardware stores and libraries to serve as collection points for CFL bulbs. Consumers can return their burned out CFL light bulbs to a participating retailer, the bulbs are collected and then sent to a recycling facility so that the mercury can be collected and used again in a new bulb. We are working on increasing our locations throughout the state, but here are our current locations.Many of the other products previously listed are being recycled. The telephone book industry has started opt-out programs. Several companies recycle carpet into such products as decorative concrete, hot mix asphalt, coal based fuel pellets, block flooring, and sediment prevention bales. And other companies recycle or resell paint. While these are excellent programs, they are not true product stewardship because the manufacturer is not taking their products back. Instead the consumer is having to do the work to seek out these recycling opportunities.
These next slides outline the basic concepts behind Product Stewardship.* The responsibility for reducing product impacts should be shared among the industry (designers, manufacturers, and retailers), government, and consumers.* The greater the ability an entity has to minimize a product’s life-cycle impacts, the greater is its degree of responsibility, and opportunity, for addressing those impacts.Manufacturers have the greatest ability to make an impact because they are the ones choosing the raw materials, design and production processes, and distributing the product.* All product lifecycle costs should be included in the total product cost– from using resources, to reducing health and environmental impacts throughout the production process, to managing products at the end-of-life.As with the Call2Recycle battery recycling, the cost of the program is built into the cost of the batteries. You’re paying for it whether you use it or not.* The environmental costs of product manufacture, use, and disposal should be minimized, to the greatest extent possible, for local and state governments, and ultimately shifted to the manufacturers and consumers of products. * Manufacturers should thus have a direct financial incentive to redesign their products to reduce these costs.
Those that are responsible for reducing the health and environmental impacts of products should have flexibility in determining how to most effectively address those impacts. The performance of company’s product stewardship programs will be measured by their results.Policies that promote and implement product stewardship principles should create incentives for the manufacturer to design and produce “cleaner” products – products made using less energy, materials, and toxins, and which result in less waste (through reduction, reuse, recycling, and composting) and use less energy to operate. These policies should also create incentives for the development of a sustainable and environmentally-sound system to collect, reuse, and recycle products at the end of their lives. In realizing these principles, Government will also provide leadership in promoting the practices of product stewardship through procurement, technical assistance, program evaluation, education, market development, agency coordination, and by addressing regulatory barriers and, where necessary, providing regulatory incentives and disincentives. Industry and government shall provide – and consumers should take full advantage of – information needed to make responsible environmental purchasing, reuse, recycling, and disposal decisions.
{read slide} We are not trying to recreate the wheel, just perfect it. We know that most people don’t have much free time anymore and so Product Stewardship has to be simple for the consumer.
In studying product stewardship in Nebraska, we’ve learned some things.First, Nebraska’s practice of government-funded collection programs is not full product stewardship because it does not share proportional responsibility with industry.And the current system places all of the financial burden on Nebraska tax payers.Current voluntary programs do provide infrastructure for future industry operated product stewardship programsWe’ve got a great start to product stewardship here in Nebraska. And through the Product Stewardship initiative, several opportunities are available to participate in national voluntary product stewardship programs.
WasteCap Nebraska has already begun to lay the foundation of Product Stewardship through partnerships with other agencies, a grant from the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality, Nebraska Environmental Trust, and assistance from the Product Stewardship Institute.Weknew that it was critical to know and understand our foundation. We identified what was already happening in Nebraska and we established a baseline of current activities in the state. From here we must build more product stewardship programs.
This is why we have developed the Nebraska Product Stewardship Toolkit. This online toolkit will help any business or community begin the transformation to product stewardship. It outlines what responsibilities each of us has in the product life-cycle and shows us how to take action.
It’s going to take all of us to make this happen. Local business, governments, health and environmental organizations, and you.
We can all help to make a difference. Take advantage of the voluntary programs that are already out there. Talk to your favorite retailers about product stewardship. Tell them you’d like to participate in programs they establish.
And be a responsible consumer. Buy better products, that are durable, perhaps used, and products that don’t contain toxins but that are made from recycled materials. Once you’re done with the product, resell it, reuse it, recycle it, or safely dispose of it.
WasteCap Nebraska is here to help you develop your product stewardship program in a common sense way. We offer several programs to help your business be an environmentally conscious business.
We currently offer several programs that can already help your business become more profitable and environmentally aware. The programs are also outlined on our blue program summary sheet. I have several available for you to take with you. {read the programs/describe them}
{read and describe programs}
{read and describe the programs}
WasteCap Nebraska is a non-profit organization that works with businesses across the state of Nebraska to improve environmental practices and increase profit. We would love to welcome each of you as a member to WasteCap. Memberships are very affordable and as a member you are able to take part in all of our programs at little or NO charge. If you are interested in membership, please see me after the presentation. There is no cost to join today. I’ll simply take down your information and our membership director will be in contact with you.
For more information on everything presented today and to get more ideas on what you can do, please visit the Nebraska Product Stewardship Toolkit online. Visit our website for the link to the toolkit.
You’ve received a lot of information today. And you may be wondering to yourself, “What am I supposed to do?” I want you to start small. Don’t overwhelm yourself. You can start by simply talking to your political representatives. Or start your own product stewardship program in your business. Start with Another Bright Idea or Call to Recycle. You don’t have to do anything complicated to begin. You can also host an E-Scrap collection event, & WasteCap will be here to help you with that. And finally, talk to the retailers you do business with and ask them to start product stewardship programs.
I’d be happy to take any of your questions.Thank you again for having me today. If you are interested in receiving any of our services or becoming a WasteCap Nebraska member, I do have information available today.