Our Award Winning Waste Reduction Program for PG&E

PG&E’s Green Ambassadors took a prestigious Richard A. Clarke Environmental Leadership Award nomination for their work on waste reduction last year. The Clarke Awards honor an individual or team whose efforts demonstrate exceptional environmental leadership within the company.

For the past two years, iReuse has worked with PG&E to reduce their waste to landfill and increase their waste diversion. We partnered with PG&E’s Green Ambassador volunteer team to help communicate, educate, and celebrate their successes. Learn more by watching the PG&E Clarke Awards Video.

Cap-and-Trade Comes to California

The California cap-and-trade program earned regulatory approval last month and is expected to be active in 2013. This cap-and-trade program is the first of its kind in the United States and will dial emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. Cap and trade programs use market efficiencies to deal with climate change by charging polluters for the right to create greenhouse gasses with permits. Efficient companies would be able to sell their permits on the open market, further incentivizing good greenhouse gas management. The amount of permitted pollution is reduced over time, so the costs of polluting will rise. Up to 8% of a company’s greenhouse gasses can be covered through credits from certified offset projects.

While there have been vocal critics of cap-and-trade schemes, emissions trading has successfully reduced pollutants under the 1990 Clean Air Act. Those seeking more data on the effects of emissions trading can check out this paper detailing the effects of SOX/NOX emissions trading on the environment. One key result: utility costs will rise once the market is established, as utilities are allowed to pass costs through to consumers. If you don’t have a comprehensive program to reduce energy use at your California operations, now is the time to get started.

In other news, Australia just passed their own version of cap-and-trade this month, joining the European Union, Tokyo, the US northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), Norway and New Zealand with some sort of carbon permitting scheme. A little back-of-the-envelope math shows that roughly 36% of the world’s GDP will be governed by carbon permitting by 2018.  Not a bad start.

Webinar Recap: New Mandatory California Commercial Recycling Rule

In this complimentary webinar we explored:

• The implications of California’s new mandatory recycling law, when it goes into effect, and what it means for your business
• How to be in compliance and benefit from the savings opportunities of increased diversion
• The 7 steps of a successful waste reduction program
• Tips from a case study showing how a leading Bay Area company turned waste reduction into reduced waste bills

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Green is the New Black

The post-recessionary case for sustainable business.

By Janine Kubert

“…[T]he goal of sustainability is to increase long-term shareholder and social value, while decreasing industry’s use of materials and reducing negative impacts on the environment.”

(Source: EPA)

I was in a meeting with a property management client recently, giving the lead engineer a report on the environmental and financial cost savings we had helped them achieve at each of their facilities.  We were reviewing a report with charts showing energy and water usage and costs, waste diversion rates, and greenhouse gases produced and avoided. Here he stopped me. “Greenhouse gases aren’t as important these days,” he said. “Given what happened at Copenhagen and the questions around the science, a lot of people I know think that tracking greenhouse gases is no longer the main point. Maybe you can push those charts to the bottom.”

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iReuse Now an EPA WasteWise Endorser

A fundamental part of iReuse’s commitment to the environment includes our role as an Endorser of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) innovative WasteWise program, the country’s first national voluntary solid waste reduction program.

As a WasteWise Endorser, iReuse encourages organizations to reduce municipal solid waste through waste prevention, recycling, and buying or manufacturing recycled products. iReuse has helped companies save hundreds of thousands of dollars in purchasing costs and waste disposal fees by reducing, reusing, and recycling solid waste materials.
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Software Tools Ease Environmental Data Tracking

Organizations will find it easier to track their environmental performance with new and upgraded software tools from iReuse, Enviance and FirstCarbon. These Internet-based enterprise software solutions for tracking environmental data including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy consumption and water use are easier to use and more customizable.

Read the full article: Software Tools Ease Environmental Data Tracking