Sustainability is quickly becoming less of a consideration and more of a necessity for corporate entities and industries in the United States. This means putting an increased focus on efficiency through sustainability and alternative solutions, resulting in less operational waste. For cleanrooms and laboratories, this can also mean safer working environments and an increase in employee morale due to the corporate commitment that many companies are making. Despite many corporations taking a fresh look at ways to become greener, sustainability can be difficult to manage for facilities dealing with hazardous materials and other contaminates. The disposal of things like safety garments and protective gloves, for instance, has been a challenging issue due to the sheer volume of these items that are consumed. The traditional disposal option for items like these is the garbage, where they eventually end up in a landfill. While landfilling is one of the cheapest disposal methods, hazardous leachate may seep into the groundwater; plus, the synthetic polymers in protective clothing and gloves will not degrade over time in a landfill. Some consider incineration to be a more sustainable option, though massive quantities of greenhouses gases and pollutants are released into the air using this method of destruction. The ideal option for things like disposable garments and gloves is recycling. However, recycling rates in the United States are still dismally low: only about four percent¹ of the hazardous waste and 34.7 percent of the municipal solid waste² was recycled in 2011. Items made of multiple components, such as synthetic fiber garments with protective linings, are even more difficult and expensive to recycle as each component must be separated and recycled individually. The traditional approach to recycling (through municipalities) does not work in this scenario because the cost of collecting, sorting, and processing materials is greater than the value of the recycled output. For this reason, more and more corporate entities are beginning to focus on non-traditional recycling options to solve for their waste streams. For example, Kimberly-Clark Professional (KCP) started a large-scale recycling program, called RightCycle, for cleanroom garments and nitrile gloves. The program allows cleanroom staff to collect their used garments, boot covers, hairnets, nitrile gloves, and other related items for recycling. These waste items are stored in on-site collection boxes which are organized onto pallets.  These sites coordinate pick-ups with their back-end recycling partner, TerraCycle. Photo: Kimberly-Clark ProfessionalSince the end of 2011, the RightCycle program has diverted more than 182,000 pounds of KCP garments and gloves from landfills, a testament to how viable programs like these can be. The company’s larger goal is to keep all of their manufacturing waste from landfills by 2015.  For context, its Global Nonwovens Division is already diverting 99 percent of manufacturing waste from landfills. All of the garments and nitrile gloves collected through the RightCycle platform are pelletized and used to replace virgin plastics in the manufacturing process. Some of the products that TerraCycle is able to create from the recycled garments and gloves are things like industrial pallets, recycled plastic lumber, and Adirondack chairs. By being repurposed instead of landfilled, the materials retain some of their value as a new raw material. Programs like this one are setting the benchmark for take-back options, making work environments more environmentally responsible while helping to achieve overall strides in sustainability.