|  Whole
Foods-South Street, Philadelphia
SEPTA
The
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Thomas
Jefferson University Hospital
BoxBundles.com
The
Rubenstein Company
Verizon,
Inc.
The
Kimmel Center
The
Daniel Building
RECYCLING SUCCESS STORIES
(Bookmark this page. We will be adding success stories regularly.
In fact, if you have a good one in the format below, e-mail
us and we will consider it for posting).
Whole
Foods - South Street
Philadelphia's South Street Whole Foods grocery store recycles office
paper, cardboard, bottles and cans, shrink-wrap, used plastic grocery
bags, obsolete computer equipment, and toner cartridges. They also
donate food to local charities, require wood pallets to be backhauled
by vendors, and in the process of planning a program to send spoiled
food and waxed cardboard to a composting facility in southern New
Jersey. As with all Whole Foods stores, they also employ a number
of creatice source reduction techniques to minimize packaging waste.
In all, the store will achieve a waste diversion rate of close to
80% once their composting program goes into place. Current savings
through recycling are estimated at $12,000 annually. With the organics
portion of their program in full operation, savings will increase
to roughly $20,000 a year.
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SEPTA
Center City Terminals
SEPTA train stations in Center City Philadelphia have long been
a centralized point of newspaper disposal for commuters throughout
the Delaware Valley. In conjunction with the Philadelphia Recycling
Office, SEPTA real estate managers evaluated the content of Suburban
Station's waste stream and estimated as much as 50-percent was newspapers.
Through a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental
Protection and the Philadelphia Streets Department, SEPTA purchased
special newspaper recycling containers and implemented an extensive
public awareness program about the need to recycle. In the end Suburban
Station was able to cut its trash disposal costs by an estimated
40-percent. The program has since expanded to SEPTA's 30th Street
Station hub and the Market East Terminal.
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The
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of the region's most precious
facilities and one of the more complex buildings to manage. With
thousands of visitors a year from all over the world, a huge volunteer
base, and numerous highly specialized professionals, the Art Museum
recycles roughly 25-percent of its waste, including mixed paper,
cardboard, food and beverage containers, exhibit construction material,
obsolete equipment and furniture, food waste from restaurants and
fluorescent lamps. The museum is also looking to expand its program
to include battery recycling and packaging material.
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Thomas
Jefferson University Hospital
Thomas Jefferson University Hospital has more than 4,000 employees
and covers 1.5 million square feet generating a very large volume
of municipal solid waste. To control its waste generation costs,
TJU began their recycling in April 1990 and has continued to expand
and refine their program every year since. The teaching hospital
saves roughly $150,000 a year on disposal costs and recycles over
600 tons of paper, cardboard, steel cans, glass, plastic, aluminum
cans, and textiles. They also donate used equipment to non-profits,
recycle X-ray film, and work with Carelift International, a local
non-profit that airlifts excess medical equipment and supplies to
hospitals and medical organizations around the world. Through Carelift,
Jefferson has donated an entire dental clinic and a fully operational
x-ray room, both made available as the result of consolidating operations.
Jefferson's donations of equipment and supplies, which include unused
surgical supplies, beds and cribs, have found grateful recipients
as far away as China, South Africa, the Republic of Georgia and
Europe.
"This is functioning equipment and supplies we were previously paying
someone to dispose of," said William Wardle, vice president for
Materials Management. "We are pleased that others are able to use
it."
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BoxBundles.com
BoxBundles.com is located in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia
and offers small business and residential moving supplies world-wide
through the Internet - especially moving boxes. BoxBundles.com ,
a venture supported by Liberty City College Promotions, Inc., is
not only conveniently accessible on the worldwide web, but they
provide supplies to movers at very competitive rates because they
use a unique source for their boxes - industrial surplus.
"Every day hundreds of thousands of boxes are scrapped without ever
leaving the factory, says company founder Mark Shay. "We purchase
trailer loads of these boxes, package them into small bundles and
sell them through our web site. Our service gives these boxes a
second chance, making their purchase very friendly to the environment.
We offer delivery to homes or businesses through our common carrier,
FedEx Ground." So successful has Shay's company been with industrial
surplus, they've now spun off a new business called Enviroboxes.com
which packages used industrial boxes for movers.
Indeed, while the recycling of cardboard is now common practice
for most businesses in the Delaware Valley, Boxbundles.com adds
value to industrial cardboard scrap by creating and packaging a
new product. Additionally, through the efficiency of on-line ordering
systems, Boxbundles.com is able to provide its customers with money-saving
moving products in a timely fashion. Their web site also offers
a number of helpful moving tips and ways to calculate supply requirements.
Boxbundles.com has operated its "Move Out!" service at the University
of Pennsylvania for over 10 years every May. More information on
this local firm may be found at: www.boxbundles.com
or www.enviroboxes.com.
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The
Rubenstein Company
The Rubenstein Company, a Philadelphia-based real estate company
is responsible for over nine million square feet of office buildings
in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, and Georgia with numerous high-profile
corporate clients. Recognizing that waste costs could be reduced
by investing in office paper recycling programs, the company purchased
over one hundred 35-gallon blue recycling containers and set up
a multi-building recycling program that now recovers over 120 tons
of paper a year for a savings of $17,000 annually. The return
on their investment in recycling took roughly five months. In 2000
The Rubenstein Company won the Governor's Award for Environmental
Excellence.
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Verizon,
Inc.
Verizon, Inc. one of the nation's premier telecommunications companies
has been a leader in corporate environmental policy for years. In
2000, Verizon recycled 10,000 tons of paper and 38,500 tons of scrap
cable and equipment. Paper recycling alone saved the company more
than $1 million in trash disposal costs. The company also purchased
180,000 tons of directory text made with recycled paper along with
$1.2 million in recycled-content office supplies. Before mixed paper
recycling became the norm for urban recovery programs, Verizon,
known then as Bell Atlantic here in our area, sponsored scores of
telephone directory recycling drives and committed to re-tooling
their procurement process in order to use recycled-content paper
in their directories. "Recycling at work may be the law," notes
GPCRC board member Joseph Verga who is also an environmental manager
for Verizon, "but it's also about efficiency and economic development."
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The
Kimmel Center
The Kimmel Center, has been recycling from the first day it opened
in early 2002. With a recycling program spearheaded by Chris Wertz,
Vice President-General Manager Pennsylvania Region for Colin Service
Systems, a facility support service contractor, the Philadelphia
region's most precious new cultural building recycles cardboard,
office paper and food and beverage containers "in the back of the
house." Plans are to kick-off a comprehensive recycling system for
patrons in food service areas before the end of 2002. It is too
early to predict savings to the facility but Wertz, who also directs
custodial services at the Academy of Music feels that the facility
has reduced its overall waste bill by at least 20% so far. Colin
Service Systems can be reached on the Internet at: www.colin.com
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The
Daniel Building
The Daniel Building is an example of a multi-tenant building with
a mix of office and retail tenants. Despite obstacles such as no
loading dock, no room for dumpsters and no dedicated service elevator,
tenants have implemented an effective recycling program at no added
cost to the building. By utilizing the services of Recycling Express,
a Frazer, PA-based recycling company, the tenants managed to recover
roughly 12 tons of mixed office paper, cardboard, aluminum cans,
glass bottles, and newspaper.
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