San Diego is honoring 10 local businesses and organizations — including three schools — that put into effect or expanded waste reduction and recycling programs, it was announced Wednesday. From establishing a cigarette butt collection and recycling program to creating a system to track solid waste tonnage to identifying diversion opportunities, the 2020 Business Waste Reduction and Recycling Award winners displayed “forward thinking” in their programs, city leaders said. “By reducing their carbon footprint in our communities, these workplaces are showing the community they care about the city’s future,” said Environmental Services Interim Director Gene Matter. “We applaud these businesses and organizations for leading the way to a greener environment and exhibiting a strong determination to make a difference for generations to come.” According to Matter, these businesses and organizations are helping the city reach its Climate Action Plan goal of achieving “Zero Waste” by 2040. Zero Waste is a principle that focuses on waste prevention, recycling, composting and other technologies to extend the life of the Miramar Landfill. Award winners have also shown their waste reduction programs lead to greater efficiency and contribute to their bottom line. The list of winners, recognized for work completed in 2019:

• LJ Crafted Wines. Wine membership utilizes reusable bottles with swing tops that are returned and exchanged for a sanitized bottle where customers choose which wines they want, directly from the barrel. This avoids single-use bottles, foils, corks and cartons.
• San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. Established a cigarette butt collection and recycling program. The butts are collected and shipped to TerraCycle which composts the cigarette paper and tobacco. The plastic filters are recycled and turned into outdoor benches and tables. A total of 17 pounds were collected in 2019.
• San Diego Mesa College. Composted 16.34 tons of pre-consumer food scraps from campus cafeterias and coffee shops for use in the on-campus garden.
• UC San Diego. All construction and demolition projects are required to divert 75% of debris from the landfill.
• San Diego State University. Implemented the SkySpark solid waste tracking system, an online, interactive waste dashboard that tracks tonnages specific to buildings on campus to help analyze and identify diversion opportunities.
• Jansen R&D. Efforts taken to become a paperless facility, such as a switch to digital signage to reduce the number of posters and flyers, and canceled subscriptions to scientific paper publications encouraging use of the centralized library with online journals.
• Hazard Center. Hosted annual Recycle/Spring Clean Up event for tenants to properly dispose of items that do not belong in the recycling container.
• San Diego Zoo. Recycles electricity via a one-megawatt energy battery that stores and discharges energy during peak hours to assist with park operations.
• Sharp Healthcare. Diverted 4.2 million pounds of material from the landfill. This included composting 500,000 pounds of food waste and reprocessing 106,000 pounds of surgical instruments. Expired, unusable medical equipment was donated to the nonprofit Ssubi is Hope.
• And San Diego Food Bank. “Turbo Separator” takes unopened but damaged and inedible cans, boxes, and jars of food, and separates the food from the packaging for compost and recycling.

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We wanted to say a huge thank you to our amazing, sustainable partners

Now, Bliss’ personal care products are packed in packaging that is nationally recyclable. To do just that, the skin care brand partnered with TerraCycle on the initiative, which allows users to send back products and packaging in flexible and rigid plastic, pumps, sprays, packets, pouches, tubes, jars and complex closures to be recycled for free. “We know that our shoppers care not only about what they're putting on their bodies, but also the implications their choices have on the environment and world around them,” Meri Baregamian, CEO of Bliss said. “We are thrilled to be entering this partnership with TerraCycle to ensure that our products are not only efficacious, but environmentally friendly. This marks one of Bliss’ key sustainability initiatives and we are excited to continue evolving our products to be cleaner and more sustainable.” In order to participate, consumers must sign up on the TerraCycle program page and mail in the packaging waste using a prepaid shipping label. Once collected, the packaging is cleaned then melted into hard plastic that can be remolded to make new recycled products, the company said. “Through the launch of this recycling program, Bliss is achieving their goal of helping everyone experience unapologetic happiness by guiding consumers to focus not only on the wellness of the skin, but on the wellness of the planet,” TerraCycle CEO and founder, Tom Szaky said. All Bliss products are cruelty-free, free from more than 1,3000 ingredients and available online and at such retailers as Target.

In March, Seattle was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the parents of Yooni Kim, a retail worker, were worried about her. They sent her a package of disposable masks, and she began wearing them to work. But that created a new problem for their environmentally conscious daughter: How could she responsibly dispose of the used masks? Soon, she discovered a potential solution: a recycling service, offered by a company called TerraCycle. For $86, TerraCycle would send Kim a small “ZeroWaste” box, roughly the size of a toaster oven, which she could fill with used masks and ship back to the company for recycling.   As Kim debated making the purchase, she wondered what happens to recycled masks, and about the environmental impacts of TerraCycle’s process. She figured it had to beat the alternative: millions of used masks piling up in landfills or being burned in incinerators, depending on the local waste company’s practices. “It is an expensive thing to invest in,” she said. “But I was open to paying for it, because if someone wants to dispose of masks responsibly, why not.” Determining what constitutes responsible disposal, however, is not straightforward. And, experts say, a truly sustainable solution would require rethinking manufacturing systems, long before any masks hit the trash or recycling bin.   TerraCycle was founded as a worm fertilizer company in 2001. Since then, it has pivoted to recycling items other companies won’t accept, such as pens and markers, plastic wrap and single-use coffee capsules. So far this year, it’s collected and processed 74,000 pounds of disposable masks, gowns and gloves, stationing ZeroWaste boxes at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas and Subaru dealerships, as well as selling them to individual consumers like Kim.   To recycle the items, workers first sort through the large piles of used personal protective equipment sent to the TerraCycle headquarters in New Jersey to ensure that the dominant material is the non-woven polypropylene used in most disposable masks. (Metal nose strips from N95 masks, for instance, are removed.) Then, the piles are melted down and shredded into a mulch-like material that can be molded into things like railroad ties and shipping pallets. The resulting plastic is structurally sound, but looks uneven and dull, so selling it doesn’t net TerraCycle much money. That’s why the recycling boxes are expensive: The high price tag offsets what would otherwise be a net loss for the company.   The process may not be profitable, but according to TerraCycle, it can help the environment. “By recycling disposable masks, they are kept out of landfills and can be made into new materials and products, reducing the need to extract new materials from the planet,” said Shaye DiPasquale, TerraCycle’s publicist. DiPasquale also noted that bacteria from landfills produce methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.   But according to Jonathan Krones, an industrial ecologist at Boston College, the environmental calculus is more complicated than that. Recycling masks doesn’t necessarily reduce demand for freshly made plastic. “Would plastic lumber or fleece have been made in the first place without the recycled plastic material? I’m not convinced,” he said. And while landfills do produce methane emissions, they’re mostly from decomposing food or paper, Krones said, not bacteria on plastics such as disposable masks. Furthermore, transporting and melting down masks during recycling requires significant energy, unlike simply letting them sit in a landfill.   Ultimately, it’s impossible to definitively determine whether it’s more environmentally friendly to throw away masks or recycle them through services like TerraCycle’s. If the goal is to reduce environmental impacts, we should be asking questions about mask manufacturing, not recycling, said Krones, because most of the environmental costs come from making masks in the first place. “There’s no good option, because the product is inherently garbage,” he said. In other countries, such as Japan and Germany, manufacturers are required to take back some used products and front a portion of the disposal costs. But no such federal rules currently exist in the US.   Still, even if recycling masks isn’t more environmentally beneficial than just tossing them, TerraCycle’s work helps remind consumers and companies that trash doesn’t disappear after it’s thrown out. Simply offering a service that requires consumers to mail in items by type illuminates the fact that not everything is easily recyclable, and that precious time and energy are required to properly sort recyclable pieces.   And, Krones said, TerraCycle’s service has the power to get more people interested in learning about recycling and disposal systems. Kim learned how difficult it can be to properly recycle everyday items, and she has since become more interested in ways to create systemic change. “We’re all doing the best we can, and ultimately, the biggest changes will have to come from corporations reducing waste,” she said. As for purchasing a TerraCycle box, she’s trying to mobilize her neighbors to buy one together, so the high cost will be shared. “If I can find people who want to split a $90 box, then I’m sure we can pack it really tight,” she said.