Understanding Beverage Container Recycling
January 16, 2002 | Businesses and Environmentalists Allied for Recycling
Businesses and Environmentalists Allied for Recycling (BEAR), a project of Global Green USA, is a coalition dedicated to significantly increasing the national recycling rate for beverage containers. BEAR’s members include recycling collection, processing and end use corporations and environmental advocacy organizations. BEAR has partnered with other stakeholders, including beverage and container producers, waste haulers and others, to launch the Multi-Stakeholder Recovery Project (MSRP) a three-stage initiative to evaluate options for moving towards BEAR’s 80 percent beverage container recycling goal. Stage One began in May 2001 with the objective of identifying an industry-wide beverage container recovery program satisfying eleven guiding principles that can be supported by the groups most critical to its success. A 13-member MSRP Task Force was formed to oversee research and seek agreement on this objective. The Task Force was comprised of members of BEAR’s Steering Committee as well as representatives of a major beverage producer, a container producer, a waste management firm, a plastics processor and local and state government. A 24-person Advisory Committee provided an even broader range of input from all types of stakeholders representing perspectives of the entire beverage container value chain.
The Value Chain Assessment was prepared to support the MSRP Stage One by providing an objective, unbiased source of information on U.S. beverage container recovery programs as they operated in the study year of 1999. The study does not attempt to project the costs and impacts of expanding or replicating existing or newly designed programs in the future. The research consulting team included R.W. Beck, Inc. (as lead), Franklin Associates Ltd., the Tellus Institute and Sound Resource Management Group, Inc. Boisson & Associates managed the project and coordinated the research consulting teams.
The full study is available here to view or download (PDF)
