When it comes to recycling, I鈥檓 spoiled. I have single-stream, curbside recycling pickup at my house in Knoxville, Tennessee. When the city recently announced it would no longer accept glass in the curbside bin, I was more than a little disappointed.
Knoxville isn鈥檛 the only municipality to experience the fickle economics of glass recycling; municipalities around the U.S. have also ceased to include glass in single-stream pickup. Many municipal recyclers bemoan low demand for recycled glass, which is more expensive to recycle.
Meanwhile, glass processing companies and brands that actually incorporate recycled glass content in their products say they can鈥檛 get enough supply of the thing municipalities say there鈥檚 no聽demand for.
This supply-demand equation gets more complex when consumers are brought into the mix: the recycling rate for glass containers in the U.S. has hovered around 33 percent for at least a decade.
Aligning supply and demand
I聽wrote a few weeks ago about Adidas and other big-name brands who are addressing plastic waste in innovative ways. That鈥檚 exciting and worthy news for the average consumer 鈥斅爌eople care about what those brands are doing and plastic pollution has a more nefarious reputation than glass.
But plastic isn鈥檛 the only recyclable material that can serve as an ingredient for another product. So who are the players working to create a more robust market for glass recycling? Last year, a diverse group of companies聽鈥斅爎anging from brewing companies to fiberglass insulation manufacturers, waste disposal and recycling companies, even investment firms聽鈥斅燾ame together to form the聽Glass Recycling Coalition (GRC). Its mission: 鈥渢o make glass recycling work鈥� by improving recycling processes and working with municipalities to build up markets.
Only a few names on the list rang a bell for me聽鈥斅爉ostly the brewers. One of those brands, Heineken, said in a聽press release, 鈥淭he extraordinary aspect of the GRC is the fact that it involves membership and collaboration across the entire glass supply chain. For the first time ever, nearly two dozen organizations 鈥� will work together to make glass recycling an efficient, high-quality and convenient service that consumers want and expect.鈥�
The聽collaboration between different levels of the supply chain聽is becoming more and more imperative to finding lasting solutions聽鈥斅爋nes that could take us further into a circular economy. We write a lot about the impact environmental reputation has on consumer purchase decisions. But even if your business isn鈥檛 in a category that鈥檚 front and center with consumers, it鈥檚 time to act. Sustainability is a very real driver for how consumers and business decision makers choose products聽鈥斅燼nd the ripples have reached deep into the supply chain.
While the knots in the recycling processes are being untangled, what can we as marketers and communicators be doing?
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