Month: January 2012

During our class on Wednesday, we talked about how upcycling is more efficient and productive for our environment as it turns waste products into something more useful. In short, the product’s usage is not being degraded and it can be used for other purposes.

I looked into companies that were actually doing this practice and one of them is TerraCycle. This company aims to eliminate the idea of waste by creating national recycling systems for previously non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle waste. They encourage anyone to join their cause by sending in any of your waste products. After this, they convert the waste into a wide variety of products and materials. TerraCycle is very successful in converting the waste they received and even has major retailers such as Walmart and Whole Foods sell TerraCycle’s products on their own shelves.

Recently, TerraCycle has launched an upcycling program for disposable diapers. As researched, disposable diapers is considered as one of the most complex waste streams in the U.S. and having a solution to this problem would benefit any large city. With this program, TerraCycle will be able to use certain parts of the disposable diaper and upcycle them into plastic lumber, pallets, and outdoor furniture while the remaining parts will be compostable (after they have been fully sterilized and processed). TerraCycle plans to reach out to various numbers of childcare facilities and hopefully build a partnership with Huggies in order for them to incorporate the new diaper program.

I find TerraCycle’s initiative different compared to what other companies are doing in terms of corporate social responsibility. These days, in order to appear that a company is engaging in “green practices”, the most common method they portray this practice is by showing to their customers that they are recycling whatever waste materials they use in order to reduce their carbon footprint. However, I feel that this doesn’t provide a strong competitive advantage to companies anymore as almost all of them have started to recycle their wastes. With TerraCycle’s upcyling program, I feel that they are trying to differentiate themselves as they are seeking towards achieving bigger and more effective goals in reducing their carbon footprint. They strongly encourage anyone to join their cause and even have different programs to offer such as incentives, bonuses, and even local events that promote their cause. They are actively engaged in increasing the worth of waste materials by converting them into other products that can be reused and sold to customers. Not that I am looking down on recycling initiatives, I just feel that upcycling is a more efficient method of reducing waste because of the higher quality products produced, which will let customers use the product longer than compared to the lower quality products produced when undergoing a recycling process only.

For more information on TerraCycle and their programs, please visit: TerraCycle.

Last year, Nike was one of the companies that joined the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. This coalition aims to reduce the environmental and social impacts of apparel and footwear products sold around the world by establishing an industry-wide index for measuring and evaluating apparel and footwear product sustainability. Just like the companies in this coalition, Nike is finally about to unveil their own product index called the Materials Sustainability Index (MSI). It took them at least eight years of research to determine the sustainability of the materials they use in making their products. Nike is teamed up with a software startup company called Earthster to publish their MSI.

I am impressed that these big and powerful companies have partnered up to make their own sustainability indexes for the products they produce. The coalition also has companies such as Walmart and Patagonia as participants. These companies are leaders in their respective industries and will hopefully be able to encourage smaller companies to do the same. This initiative will also create awareness among product designers whenever they are working to produce the company’s products. This index will help them understand the environmental impacts of their work by enabling them to be more thoughtful of their choices in terms of which materials to use to produce footwear and apparel.

Nike aims to spark conversation about using sustainable materials among individuals. With this goal, I believe that Nike and the other members of the coalition will be able to make a necessary change on producers with their actions in terms of the materials they use in producing company goods. This initiative is quite new and I am certain that the world won’t see immediate changes. However, it is good that these leading companies are setting a good example to other companies and individuals worldwide.

Seeing that sustainability is definitely a rising trend in our world today, I think that it will be easier to convince people on the mission of this initiative and get them to jump on the “go green” bandwagon as well. If everyone is on board with this movement, we will slowly see positive changes in our world. Eventually, this initiative may be able to reduce harmful impacts to our environment and at the same time, benefit companies as they reduce their costs and risks.

For more information on this coalition, please see this article
.