Community Recycling Played Host to local area Recycling and DEP Officials

Yesterday, Community Recycling welcomed local area County Recycling Officials and PA Department of Environmental Protection Officials for a special tour of their operations following their monthly meeting. Community Recycling President Ira Baseman kicked off the event with a short overview of the world of reuse in clothing, shoes, bags, belts, and other textiles.

The Powerhouse Recycling Visiting Team consisted of Sue Cordes, Recycling Coordinator of Delaware County, Nancy Fromnick, Chester County Recycling Coordinator, Veronica Harris, Montgomery County Recycling Manager, Art Feltes, Recycling Coordinator of Bucks County, Scott McGrath, Environmental Services Director for the City of Philadelphia, Ann Ryan, PADEP for Bucks, Delaware and Philadelphia Counties, Mary Alice Reisse, PADEP for Chester and Montgomery Counties.    

Community Recycling highlighted many of their exciting and innovative clothing recycling solutions such as CR Kids for schools, CR Campus for colleges and universities, CR Home for residents in single family and multi-unit dwellings, ShoeBox Recycling, Clothing Bins and how any and all of these solutions can be easily applied to a community with great waste diversion results.

Unlike traditional recyclables that are routinely and easily recovered in Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), clothing recycling is on the low end of material recovery in the mindset of most US residents. The US EPA tells us that about 70 pounds of perfectly good, reusable and re-wearable material get landfilled each and every year. That amounts to over 13.1 million tons!

The EPA further states that clothing recycling today has an equivalent impact of removing one million cars from the nation’s roads. If recycling clothes was more prevalent, we could effectively contribute to a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

Community Recycling is actively and aggressively seeking out all to ‘Join the Reuse Movement.’ During the tour of the warehouse, Community Recycling was able to connect the dots between all the extra reusable and re-wearable materials collected and the people and places around the globe that the material will travel to; People Recycling for People.

So look in your closets, check your shoes and see if that purse still matches your eyes…there is a REUSE Movement underway and all are welcome to join!