welcome thank you for graciously waiting for a couple of minutes as we all managed to filter into the room here today my name's lisa millar i'm the director here at the grand valley state university's myer campus in holland and i am so incredibly thrilled on behalf of our campus green team to welcome you to the first inaugural and hopefully annual america recycles day events in holland what you're going to see today in this lunch is an opportunity to hear from local leaders about what's going on in terms of recycling all week long we've had a series of luncheon learns that really focus on the individual you've had sally veterans who is a former university can freestone who's a mess or a gardener and just man about town may ask your compost or sorry sorry mess or compost or who's composting techniques could help you become a master gardener i'm sure at some point  and then also dung trees and who spoke on behalf of what's going on with the city energy plan yesterday so we really have an idea of how as we as individuals can utilize some of the ways that we're generating and put it towards some new level of productivity outside today you'll see that we've got a variety of great community organizations that are collecting recyclables that you can bring we're hoping to serve as a one stop shop so hopefully everybody brought their things that have been kind of laying around the house and looking for ways to dispose of them responsibly before we all have folks over for the thanksgiving holiday and then today then this afternoon we have first off ryan kahn who is the city manager who will speak a little bit about what's going on in the city and then we're also going to move into some great speakers will introduce after we hear from south thank you very much and  i just want to say that i'm the luckiest city manager in the states not only because i'm serving holland but in my career here because of what holland it's been doing i'm also able to work on one of my first goals in life and that was to be an environmental scientist and i switched majors and became a local government management person but this is wonderful because everything that holland does a lot of what on does is also associated with environmental activities and good purposes so going back before my time the city adopted a recycling program involving now chef container and that means is you can put all your recyclables in one spot i've been to many of you know and it gets picked up essentially for free every year every week and if you want a level of trash service you choose  wife and i have the level that means you buy per bag and you know we put one bag out once a month is all we have our children are now way so that makes it a little bit getting easier but we put one bag a week out of cory's we can all reduce our packaging you know as a society that would even go down but in the meantime it's wonderful to have that program in holland and that's a better program than any place we've ben and in fact holland was a leader in  forefront in that i believe i'm told that ann arbor and holland were the first in the state to have that kind of conference recycling program so today i'm going to read a proclamation that honors all that activity and also i want to then tell you a little bit about the sustainability commission that we're honored to have here with us the chairperson in the audience pauly and then i want to talk about the sustainability work that our energy plan is is attempting to cover and sounds like you heard a little bit about that yesterday where most of you here yesterday also all right so there won't be too much to do redundant but i have to form a proclamation first from the mayor of the city of holland kurt dykstra he is currently engaged in meeting with the council from mexico i believe today so he is unable to be here and and that is something very important to him as well as well as what you're going to hear now whereas holland michigan recognizes the importance of protecting and preserving our natural resources and adopting consonance this habits that will improve our daily lives and bring about a cleaner safer and more sustainable environment and whereas although there has been a significant increase in the amount of recycling in the hall in michigan to date we must also continue to focus on other initiatives such as waste reduction composting the reuse of products materials and purchasing recycle products and whereas we encouraging businesses state agencies nonprofit organizations schools and individuals to celebrate america recycles day two thousand and thirteen we can further promote recycling as an environmentally efficient and economically smart habit whereas state and community leaders can help encourage recycling by informing citizens about local recycling options they can also help foster greater awareness of the need to expand collections programs by promoting the benefits or cycling investments for businesses and lastly whereas it is important that all holland michigan citizens become involved in recycling activities and learn more about the many recycled and recyclable products available to them as consumers and it's also fitting for holland michigan to celebrate america recycles day two thousand and thirteen number fifteen and take action by educating citizens about the recycling options available in our community now therefore i may or kirti dykstra do hereby recognize a number fifteen two thousand and thirteen as america recycle well this proclamation is one small step in the many that you've heard about already regarding recycling if you pay attention to our website or our press releases or our community or had services page you also see that there's recycling contest every year and this june once a week we went out and we opened up bags of trash i got to do that i was an inspector you wear a head to toe hazardous waste outfit and they give you tongs and you rip open this bag and actually it's not trash it's a recycling bag and you checked the contents and those who were really conscientious about the way they recycled rinsed out the glasses paid attention to what and what was not got free trash service i think for six months or so we'll be doing that again this jan and look for those announcements i think we also announce it something from chef container so in those ways we try to embellish the recycling program get the word across and this is a great asset for that purpose i thank you thank you lisa so i want to also talk about sustainability commission this is a commission founded by council i think in two thousand nine appointed by council and because of them we have among other things what we call the community energy plan and this is a brochure about it and it's untitled holland where big ideas come alive and the big idea was to hire in an internationally renowned expert in energy in the name of peter gar forth and he led the community through a multi year series of meetings and a community energy plan which is one hundred some page document about improving energy efficiency in a way that it makes it less expensive to produce energy more environmental in terms of the outcomes and less expensive for the consumer to use energy be it home owners or businesses so we're engaged ever since that plan was done through a variety of seven citizen task forces in implementing that energy plan and that energy plan has if anyone is here interested or watching wanting to be involved in their neighborhood or at the city hall in relation to district heating which is a centralized way of of heating our homes rather than individual furnace is much more efficient from waste heat that the power plant gives off or building energy labeling if you have the energy if you've been certified as an energy smart home through a process that we're coming up with they'll be a label in your home when i talk to realtors about that program their eyes light up because it it's really an instantaneous way of acknowledge of of seeing that your home has value and that value translates into higher prices and good things for all involved as well as lower energy bills there's a task force on home energy retrofits because how do you get to the point where you can be certified well there's a retrofit program that we're establishing we hope to even tweak some legislation to make it more useful for us and we're grateful to our legislators for that if you see them let them know that they have your support in tweaking that legislation the other programs that we are working on is of course we are converting to natural gas from coal and that has an energy improvement in terms of efficiency as well as reduction in pollutants i'm blanking on the  i'm like one fifth the number of the amount of carbon does anyone know in media that it's a huge dramatic reduction in the amount of sulfur and carbon that that will produce in terms of creating energy so we're looking forward to that and that will be on line in two thousand and sixteen right now you can buy renewable energy i took a tour with the board of public works better bus load fall to indiana the wind farm in indiana it's a beautiful site seventy turbines doing their work you can hardly hear him and the corn doesn't mind and that energy the city roughly one seventh of that wind farm and we have a representative of works here can correct me if i get my facts a little skewed for one and a half cents per kilowatt hour which is only about three dollars for a typical home you can have that energy from indiana wind and i do for example emerging courage in others to sign up for that so that means even though you're you're you're burning something in your home you know there's something burning to heat your  home you think it's coming from the electricity that's that is from burned call that's not the case if you sign up for this program it's indiana when it's producing that energy so if you are into this even further and you sometimes need to use a car in the city of holland you can sign up for this program you can buy a volt that has a battery from l g chem which the first shipment is coming out next week of batteries and through this mint mechanism in this technology in our lifetimes you can drive not from any off shore oil not from alaskan oil but from wind flows over the plains of indiana so that's what you can do in the city of holland and that's the kind of thing that this energy plan wants to help people realize and understand through all these mechanisms there's also an industrial and energy bundling taskforce and there is a commercial and it's institutional energy task force and that will help institutions or reduce their energy costs as well so it's a forty year plan we are roughly a year and a half into it so satan's there be more involved now the standard billy commission is not resting on their laurels they were able to create this next step is a full fledged stand ability framework that has the blessing of the city council that will be before the council next week and also on december fourth and polly as chair of this estate really commission is really the one who should explain that but it's a way of looking at the multitude of daily and weekly an angle actions that our community has our leaders in ways that  have a sustainability aspect to those decisions so that completes my remarks if you have an answer to questions well there was a great kickoff to the sludge and i'm going to move to hear from a couple of speakers and i'm hoping that as adults we can also regulate everyone gets about ten minutes i'm just going to introduce folks up front ask you to introduce yourselves again  as you come up but we have first up from chef container met by a lad who i want to say is that an absolutely amazing job helping us get all of this off the ground started as a green team which is a small group of students faculty staff community members sitting room saying we should do something for america recycles day we started working with the city we started working with matt from chef container and the next thing you know we've been managed we've been able to produce some really great things that should be longstanding resources for the community including a recycling guide and a recycling web page that is recycling recycle recite recycling is knowledge dot com it is found in the recycling guide but recycling is knowledge dot com so  those resources you can go to at any time take a look and see where you can recycle some of maybe those more difficult or confusing where can i recycle fertilizer in this community where can i recycle medicine where can i recycle paint that's the sort of information that you'll find in this guide and that's been instrumental in jeff containers been instrumental in making that happen so matt's going to chat we also have martin carlson from herman miller who's going to talk about some the outstanding work they're doing  thank you very much as lisa said we put together this really cool recycling guide with a lot of community involvement in it with those sponsor the printing of it chef container and g p s you worked pretty diligently on putting the content in g p s you did all the graphics for it and blue sky sessions one of our local partners here in town helped bring together the website which is recycling his knowledge dot com where you can find this and a whole bunch of other resources including what we did was to kind of extend this was a hundred twenty second sustainability video series where we looked out to people within the state not only from here locally but also a little bit further  here locally in a huge benefactor of recycling in west michigan has a video within that and herman miller which is one of our larger greener manufacturers here in the in the local community has a video on that so that came together really nice lisa and her team you know gets a great big brown of applause on that too early for a lot of effort into it and as she said that's going to be there for some time as a reminder to the community that the options are available for him in the education's out there if they want it and that's kind of where we kind of tagged in the recycling is knowledge dot com u r l from because the more you know about recycling  opportunities that you have to go out and explore your community and know hey i've got batteries to go here have got paint recycle heretical like in holland recycle spain or hey i've got electronics i can go to a goodwill store and drop off my electronics or you know these are the opportunities that we want every resident to know because recycling is a big key in it but the reduction of waste is the bigger key recycling is the reuse of materials into something else but when you reduce waste by bringing it to an organization like a goodwill for example they have a value stream proposition which is covered in the video that nick carlson did where there's multiple tiers that happens before recycling recycling is an important part of it but whether it's goodwill or it's repco light they're taking these products and they're using them for other things and if they can't do that with it then it becomes recycling and that's very important in the journey of these materials so we always encourage everyone to look out for those and see where those local programs are available look at the website and you know other than that there's partners like chef container that help develop programs and you know continue to advance those programs through yard waste or green waste or other different streams and you know we're thankful for those opportunities and we always enjoy hearing from the residents and questions part of that website has an ask an expert area where it goes either marion hensley from the city or goes to me at chef and between the two of us marianne's a pretty young girl but we've got one hundred years of experience in there and you know between the two of us we should be able to figure out where that stuff goes for you and if we can't we can definitely point you towards some other resources and reach out to the state level resources for you so just again a big round of applause for g b s you for putting us all together with us and thank you ok martine carlson from her miller so when we take a look and start thinking about where do you start and initiate a good commitment from a company and how do you get everybody kind of inspired and want to do the good things we usually come up with  statement that was penned by d j dupree one of our founders and it says that home miller wants to make sure that we're going to stay good corporate steward environment for the environment so when we look at a statement like that we think about how deep and how much that can really touch us what's interesting to me is it's supposed to be something that's cool and fun and current and this was done in one nine hundred fifty three so for us as a company looking at where it starts and where it begins and taking that core foundation and how we have to move it forward and what we can do to keep everybody inspired and what we can do to change that and make it so that everyone still moving forward with it so we start looking at ways that we can do best and move those values and principles forward so we look at how we design our products we look at how we develop our products we look at how we're going to dispose of our products we look at the kinds of things that we're going to be able to distribute and then we also look at what we're going to be able to dream forward so when we look at designing our products we have teams in place design for the environment teams and this group of engineers are geared with that focus of what is in our products what are we going to do to this product before it's even going to hit that floor for someone what's the chemistry of the product what is the make up of the materials in it and what's going to happen in this product when someone's at the end of life for it in the future so we want to make sure those things are being asked ahead of time and that we're already putting those thoughts together before we put this product out there as a purchased item then you look at how we're going to dispose of things this is even within our own company you look at the types of things that you're manufacturing and you break apart what can be recycled what can be reused how we're going to have these items out there whether it's the packaging coming in for the parts or the items that the people use when they're sitting at lunch everyone sitting at lunch they're done with their apple we have to be conscientious of what those people are going to do with this item because it's going to be leaving our building it's going to be making an impact for herman miller regardless if it has anything to do with our product so we start putting commitments in place and we start putting partnerships together so we talked with jeff and you talk with pad know some you talk with her you talk with all these other companies and see what can they offer us and at the same time what learning have they had from some of the other companies in the area we're not the only people who have people sitting at launching an apple so we know there's got be things out there that make it so that everyone can learn from that together and you want to make sure that everybody has that same type of commitment and the same type of avenues available sometimes if only one person is disposing it's not as lucrative for everyone unless there are several other people that are disposing of the same items so then you also take a look at what can you have with them in one thousand nine hundred two hundred mil or built a proportion of their facility most of what we dispose of the main site facility is wood so i would waste instead of having it become a waste that leaves the building we've created an energy center we burn the wood and it generates the steam that we function in our own facility so we're using our own ways to give us some benefit within the building when you look out and look at the community what can we offer to them can you connect with habitat for humanity for the restart options goodwill is here the same type of connection can you connect with someone like learning from scratch which is a teacher who has put together a group where she takes in some of these items and offers them to schools so that can be reviews great opportunity to use things like folders office material it's all things that have to be disposed of in a company's our operation then you try to create cultures the creating the cultures comes from several different areas for employee engagement you try to create that culture where it makes sense what they're doing you want them to bring their items from home we've added a container outside of our facility where we offer herman miller employees to bring in the recycling dispose of it at work right on your way it's something you do at home it's something you learn to do it's part of your natural fiber and you continue to want to do it at work we look at our suppliers we send teams out to connect with our suppliers and see if there's something that they would have a better chance recycling if there's more of us involved with that sometimes it's not as easy as looking at your waste office paper and just your mix paper is there more items you have or there plastics you need to get rid of are there fabrics you need to take a look at how is someone else compiling this much material to make it of value to actually collect and store it separately and then you also look at your customer engagement at the end of life of a product does it make sense to ask them to purchase new material from you but don't give them any assistance of whether or not they can get rid of what you're replacing it's much more engaging for them if you're offering them that assistance of how they can get rid of their materials that they're replacing with your new materials it makes your materials more valuable to them as well so making sure that they have a way of connecting with some type of a nonprofit organization or repurchasing those in any kind of an off stream location maybe there's a school that needs the color that they're using switching  with blue chairs giving them orange chairs maybe there's a school who's interested in that they can afford brand new brand new chairs we make that connection for them and that's part of our groups and then you look at community engagement we work with we me act the west michigan environmental action and we also work with the west out of public schools and we connect with the fifth graders and the sixth graders and we start the kids kind of thinking what can they do the most important foundation is making sure we get kids excited about science we want these kids to grow up and be the next group of people who are coming up with these creative cool ideas if science isn't in their moral fiber them right away we're losing out an opportunity to get these kids excited about what their future could be so understanding the fun stuff getting them out playing in the streams looking for the the for the bugs in the critters gets them to start understanding that science can be fun and then we're nurturing that engagement for them to have that science base in the future and then how we distribute stuff so looking at the packaging it's both how it comes in and how it goes out the packaging that we have can we blanket wrap something instead of something sending someone a chair full of all this cardboard that they got a trip over can we have materials come in on returnable packaging we're dealing with the same suppliers every day why are we getting packaging that doesn't go back and forth so putting  seems together to make sure this is another piece that you look at always important and then dream so everybody dreams of the big wedding everybody dreams of that fancy car and everybody dreams of the lottery we just need everybody to start dreaming for us to have what we can do in the future and how we can make that environment better and everything  hello i'm jim from goodwill of west michigan and today have brought rocky with me brett as our store manager at our north island store thank you for having us here today we appreciate this opportunity to talk about goodwill in a different things that goodwill does to reuse stuff and we get a lot of stuff thank goodness that is donated to goodwill and thank you to the communities and to everyone here who has donated to goodwill because it's helping provide jobs and helping us to to do our mission in west michigan goodwills been the number the world's i think number one real user of goods for about one hundred years we've been reducing good started out in boston bad year helms and we're doing that today reusing items that are donated to goodwill to help us with our mission the different things that we recycle discontinued to grow and grow each year and that we can reuse and then and that are salvaged also the grows every year so the things that we do now are textiles computers televisions belts purses backpacks cellphones plastic toys shoes books metals i think that's about it and cardboard thank you so is it the list is really never ending we want to make sure that we're keeping things out of the waste stream that are being donated to goodwill another thing that we do with that when folks are donating to go well we have all the stuff that we course you know that we sell in our stores and we have sixteen retail stores in our district that we serve and we have a donation center in faeries bird is what we want to do is provide work opportunities for people so it's coming into the holiday time of year christmas time what people usually get to get a new t v they get a new computer what do i do with my old computer a lot of these end up at goodwill we haven't put a computer in the waste stream fence two thousand and five we haven't thrown a television away in the last three to four years they're either recycled or the sold in our stores so we're ready for this influx of things that are going to be donated to goodwill during this holiday season the cool part of that is too is that we're putting people to work in one of the barriers that people have in their lives and we're several barriers that goodwill addresses but one of the barriers that people have in their lifes is incarceration or being in prison and we connect with people that are incarcerated we connect with them while they're still in prison they get out of prison they can come to goodwill and get a job we help them with health care we help them find a place to live they have a case worker to get these people back out in being a productive member of society those are the folks that are taking these computers and putting them on pallets and separating all of these goods that are donated to goodwill and with of providing work for these people work in our work center for our participants in the in the folks that we serve a disability the same thing we have work that's for folks there to all that is made possible because of the donors that we have here in west michigan last year we serve over twenty thousand people in west michigan we kept over ten million pounds of things out of the waste stream we reuse them recycle them or salvaged them and that added over seventeen million dollars to our bottom line we're pretty much self funded we have our own way of funding our mission we don't have to rely too much on state or federal funding which is a great thing to do but we do rely on the communities that we serve we rely on each and every one of you donate to goodwill to help provide jobs for people again we have sixteen stores if you're north to manage steve that's our farthest north to south we have to our son or our store in south island and to the east we have store in cedar springs and we have one a nail in del right near the grand valley campus in allendale and to the west we have beautiful lake michigan so we don't have any stores out there so again thank you for this opportunity it's wonderful to be able to connect all of the things that we can connect keeping having donations come to us not throwing those things away or have not a big waste disposal bill being able to put people to work providing low cost clothing and home goods for our shoppers that's another big part of our mission to provide low cost things for folks that can come in to goodwill and find great things to to wear and have great things for their home so thank you for everything you do in your community thank you for making goodwill a part of it we appreciate it we look forward to doing this many years to come thank you hi my name is elise giles and i'm here from carper newman thank you for inviting us to america recycles day hopefully it's the first of many and i want to tell you a little bit about company you what we do and how we can help  you electronics today they're just accelerated thing at rapid speeds and it creates a huge problem like what are we going to do with all of these you know new updates and you know what are we going to do that only thirty percent well less than thirty percent are recycled and you know such a huge opportunity there we need to get better at that so education is a huge part of  that electronics can be toxic in our environment they contaminate the ground water release harmful chemicals into the atmosphere and in the live time this electronic is exported to third world countries where they will incinerator disassemble there and it's just terrible that we do  that and you can recycle this by and you can minimize the environmental impact by reusing it a lot of these electronics are still working and so they don't need to be disassembled yet and we resell them in our  than we do recycle the nine usable items and specialists safely dispose of use harmful materials company we are a specialized electronics recycling and refer fishing company we work with corporations as long as and this residence and we protect people and the environment from problems associated with electronic waste work community recycling resource we provide education and job skills training programs with a lot of volunteer groups that we work with community partners set two easter eggs right now in grand rapids but we'll have one in holland coming soon hopefully this fall so and we have a local processing facility in grand rapids that will handle over five million pounds this year and we've been in business over twenty seven years with over twelve thousand satisfied customers so you can just see how we've been growing in the past three years will be over five million pounds this year which is incredible in some ways that we could help you we're really convenient we'll take anything with a battery or cord except for a big box electronics so  just don't bring like a refrigerator something like that which would be really hard to do anyway so we have excellent customer service and everything that you bring us will be securely wiped according to our two standards so you don't need to worry about removing your hard drive if you bring us a computer or a phone or anything like that and everything is transported securely we have security cameras and we are certified  that's really good and you know the components come in and separated disassembled and then sent to approved vendors that meter standards and then process registered with the state of michigan department of environmental quality and we're a universal we stroller we have a lot of clients that we work with we do have like employee programs and as long as the the corporate programs too and we have community partners that we provide job readiness programs so we were with the high risk youth in grand rapids i'm give them jobs during the summer  program the company can to me as well as just some other groups that come in volunteer we educate them and they learn new skills and learn how to help the environment so if you're interested in getting involved with what we do you can organize a recycling about and you could volunteer company you could join our environmental education program and just keep recycling so thank you for having us here today all right so i'm going to start by just asking if there's something you really want to know about recycling that you haven't heard already here today because i can go in a lot of different directions with this nothing no that's a good one so that right now the things that are the most challenging to recycle are items that are heavily commingled so if you were to look at plastic item that's been manufactured and on it there's six or seven different components that are all attach together and it would take somebody maybe twenty minutes or forty five minutes to have to disassemble it to break it down to its core components those items are very difficult to recycle so there's a lot of do things coming up a lot of new technology that's coming up to help us be able to do that but that still presents quite a challenge it's a great question had us has been recycling for over one hundred years very excited about that i always have to start out with some of the history about the panels family they're just an amazing family anyone who lives in holland of course knows about them but they're just so warm and so wonderful to work for they care so much about every one of us you feel like you're part of their family working at this company so to them recycling isn't just about getting rid of the things that you don't know what to do with it's about building lives for people and true sustainability and triple bottom line philosophy where you're paying as much attention to your environment your community your workers as well as doing the right thing by the earth so the first actual site in holland opened in one thousand ten on river avenue and this is louis had no us our wonderful founder then we started our hundred and ninety used a street site and then we started to do waste paper and this is some of the old equipment i believe this is around the one nine hundred fifty s and even then you can imagine it was pretty hard to move some of this paper around but we did it a lot of people don't realize that recycling was happening even back then this was our first crane that we invested in in one nine hundred forty it takes some pretty big equipment to do big recycling and then things really changed in the seventy's so in one nine hundred seventy one we invested in one of the first car shredders so i don't know if any of you had an opportunity to see our shredder but you're all invited i am happy to show it to you it is quite an experience but it literally eats cars so you know the cranes pick up the cars in the car comes in it's worked out all the materials of the car in outcomes things that you can actually reduce it's pretty amazing and i can't say that there isn't any ways from the process and we keep  the way that we do this technology but before it was almost impossible to recycle some of these items and it's an incredible thing to be highly recommended these are different locations so we're based heavily in west michigan all the way up to traverse city over to lansing oma down to the better harbor area but that is just our physical locations that's where people have a place that they can bring their materials whether it's paper or plastic or metal we also trade materials really all over the world so sometimes there's relationships that we're aware of and we know that if you have a certain item in quantity that somebody needs it over here and so we help facilitate those relationships for any of our partners we have lots of values and this is where i get really excited so being part of the panel is team there's a lot of things that we still do that are very traditional and one of those is the profit sharing plan so yes we have traditional for a one k s and we get benefits but the company always gives back to each of us so every year when they figure out exactly how we've done there's a senator of that that comes back to each of us so people who may have some of these jobs that are hard like pushing that paper around or you know going sorting through models and things that are difficult jobs they know at the end of their career and it's common for us to have people work for us for thirty forty forty five years that they're going to have a really nice retirement at the end they're heavy donators they don't usually talk about some of the giving that they do but they have always done a lot for the community specifically in the arts and education r and this is my other favorite one so i have two young boys that are three and six so i know that when my kids get ready to go to college assuming they can maintain a c average because that's a requirement they're going to pay a good percentage of that tuition for them to go to college it's pretty person probably to be working for panels but then we have a really good internship so this is some of the some of what it looks like you know the cars come in there at the end of their life they're usually flattened by someone some of the basic things end up getting removed the radiators the catalytic converters they have some of the higher valued metals and all the fluids and anything that's toxic in the in in them gets removed ahead of time and then they're ran through the shredder and out of that comes this material is the shear so if something is too big to put in the shredder sometimes it will go through the shear first or guys work very hard i must say and then we also have a bailing out ration in addition to bailing paper we bail things like aluminum in tin and this is all it's if you think about this type of recycling it's a little bit like making a recipe so whether it's a paper mill that you're selling to or whether it's  foundry that you're selling to they have very specific types of chemistries that they're looking for in order to be able to me the next product down the line so part of our role is to gather the material we get enough of it that we're able to build that package the ingredients a little bit like giving someone eggs and flour we're giving them a little bit of town a little bit of aluminum a little bit of steel or in the paper world maybe they need some newspaper some magazine all of these different things to help build the next product we have one of two hot for cat operations actually in the united states so some of this material turns into these for cats which are used by foundries they love them also very cool if you work for pavlos one of the tests is they make you climb up to the top of that and see if that you can handle it and then maybe you can work the little scary it was ok so a lot of people don't understand the difference between metals and you know for just the basic lay person if you have a bunch of metal laying around your house you're like i think i want to recycle this one of the things you can do is just simply take a magnet if a magnet sticks to it then it's a ferris model it has iron content if the magnet doesn't stick to it then it's a non ferrous metals and probably has a higher value most of the non ferrous metals are literally listed on the periodic table in science and so your coppers are usually the higher values there are some that are even higher value than that like you're carbides things that are tool bits and things like that so even if you only had a few pounds of copper it's worth the trip to the scrap yard i mean you should definitely recycle those items the more that you segregate it the more value you're going to get from it will take it if it's all mixed together but we love it when you segregate and this is a couple pictures from our paper plant so we have separate plants that do some of these different process things most of the metal the ferrous metals done outside non ferrous metal would be done inside paper is done inside obviously you don't want the paper getting all wet and then have the plastics division so this is really my my baby this is what i love to do with plastic plastics are challenging but they're a little bit more challenging i believe than the papers or the metals because plastic is a chemical it's a chain reaction that makes it happen so you can't take something that is an l the p e film that you see up here and mix it with an h p e crate and i'm not a hundred percent sure what this is but it's probably there are a nylon or maybe an a b s type part you can't take those and mix them together and have anything of value at the other end these plastics all melt at different temperatures so they have to be kept separate they have to be ground and processed with their own family so usually the larger items started are shredder so they come right through this comparable and they go up into the shredder sort of like the car shredder not quite as big then they have to be granulated we have multiple different types of metal sen and detection devices and removal devices to make sure that if there was a mystery were a clip or something in that it gets removed at that time and of course we then recycle the metal if we recover it and then we can either put it to a blender we can move it to a wash line we can take it and dry it whatever that particular material needs to have done until you get your finished product we also have our own machine shop so here we are able to keep most of our own equipment running in house we also do a lot of work for other tool shops there's times where some of our partners may have some equipment that has broken down and we've been able to come in and help them on the fly we build custom containers for people so if they have a specific need they don't know how they're going to go about recycling something if we can figure it out we do it by working on some projects right now with injection molders to build them specific purge because when you start up an injection molding machine there is a part of that plastic that gets purged out that material needs to be collected in a way where it keeps it segregated and keeps it clean so that it can still be recycled we also do export so it is a global economy today and it's really based on supply and demand i think there's probably a lot of confusion about the export market but for the most part things if it makes financial sense for those things to stay domestically and we have processes here to recycle them we are very careful with items that are i exported to make sure that those items are being handled in appropriately this was actually a trip that a group of the managers and leaders from had those took to china to review some of the practices that were happening there because we wanted to make sure that our we were contributing to the issues that are over there with some of the toxic that's pretty amazing and this is some of the recycling you see and other countries are kind of excited that we don't have to do it this way but we will take your refrigerator and you could write it into a send a bike if you wanted to be really sustainable that would be  says a big supporter of the arts so we love we love art and we love to support our ventures and we like to make sculptures out of some of our scrap because we believe scrap is beautiful and that's all i have unless you have some questions well it's going to be your specialty metals will have the highest value items like carbide you know will range anywhere from nine dollars to thirteen dollars a pound so you know if you if you see some car buy that would definitely be a good  one but it's surprising i think that people don't realize how much value some of the engineers resins can have the plastic resins so if you've got a good polycarbonate resin that's clean and you have it in quantity that can that can be pretty valuable stuff so but you know it in our business is very layered you know we we have lots of partners and that's part of what works were were really the end stop in making that package that's going to go to the foundry that's going to go to the paper mill that's going to go to the injection molder but we partner with all kinds of people and it gets complicated because we just want to make sure things get recycled and hopefully maybe we are for profit we do want to make a profit at the end of the day it is a wonderful story if i had had more time i would have went into more detail but it's pretty cool  your training program and have people on site so we appreciate that so i feel kind of like we're among family this is my going on seventeenth here at grand valley  up to about zero is seven eight years ago we were diverting about twenty percent or twenty percent of our waste from mike my goal before i retire is fifty percent and this year we're tracking in the upper forty's so so maybe it's a realistic goal so help me ok but today i want to talk about our game day challenge which is  a and it's a national contest where you pick one of your home football games and you're competing against every college and university in the country that chooses to be part of that program we did it for the first time last year and with volunteers and so forth we we recycled approximately sixty percent of our way street so  this year we've been doing that at every every home game yeah it's a collaborative effort facilities services we help coordinate it provide the containers the trash can calls that the material finally ends up into we have campus dining and they've been a great help in the concession side trying to give us food packaging that can either be recycled or composed athletics have been a great help to us you know given us our passes to get into the games and and initiative office has been a great help and this year our in turn kim has just spent countless hours getting volunteers to to man our recycling stations that every home game or student environmental coalition they were instrumental in and getting recycling started at our home football game several years ago and continue to be active news and information services to help us with promoting that whether it be our or big sign out front as you drive in in our publications those types of things and our our way service contractor has as spent just excellent in helping us last last year we turned our trucks into mobile billboards and  that that was another way we could get the word out so this year within our stadium we have fifteen stations where the the blue is for recycling the green for composting and the grave for landfill and we we hope to limit that to things like potato chip bags and plastic contaminated by food things recycling our recycling team would go around to the different stations pick up the waste in this case you can see the green bags and these are  and we wave that we wait each bag and then put them in the proper container the the groups that volunteer the the possible cans and bottles recyclable material and the clear bags waste dumpster that doesn't doesn't have very much on it at that time so this we had seven one games and our last ones tomorrow  you want to come out and see of placing our valley that would be great but we have had all of these different groups volunteer ranging from a wall of nine which really wasn't quite enough the demand on the stations to work the student nursing association they made that a requirement and we had forty one so we had someone on every corner th we'd we just found out this week that on the national competition in the category of waste minimisation we came in second in the nation so we were very very  why even competing against some of the the the non schools for or for this type of thing or higher state you know every year they're there at the top for waste diversion we were just  so so pleased with that how do we structure it what we have volunteers that are assigned to each of the fifteen stations and they stand there the whole game and and show people as they come with with their debris which which basket they go and then our recycle team and custodians come remove the fold bags they bring them to our staging area were challenge website and if you would like to go there it's just game day challenge be sure to put in the challenge otherwise you're going to get p s p and game day so again big challenge dot org and you can get the full results upcoming events we've been so successful at football games that this year we're going to start with basketball games home basketball games and sorra looking forward to that and then recycle meaning there will be thirteen i believe it's in there are seven or eight year of participating in recycle mania in january at this time i'll turn it over to lea so i'm here today and we have our green team on this particular campus and obviously we are part of and proud of being part of grambling state university as a whole of our we have a unique mission here working with our center for adult continuing studies and we are big proponents of lifelong learning and our students faculty staff and some community members and as well as a lot of nine have gotten together about five years ago or so and said what can we do in our office and on this campus to really kind of deepen our relationship with  issues in this community and so we formed a green team we sat down and we tried to figure out some of the improvements that we could make on this campus i want to share a few of them briefly with you today but perhaps more importantly if you go to our home web site and you are committed since the inability we've been trying to be very diligent in documenting the work that we've done because we know that a lot of the work that we've been able to do other departments offices organizations might want to implement as well so we've done a few things from taking a look at our outside making sure we have native plants working with how often we're actually watering our lawn how can we reduce the size of our lawn and we have dramatically reduced the size of our lawn space and gone back some natural more wild flower spaces in the past few years looking around inside we've been working with our heating and cooling we've been working very diligently on our lighting talking about how our hours what our hours look like in the summer how we can adjust things to make sure that we're not expending too much energy or more than what's needed we've also done a lot on our purchasing one of the things that i think was really amazing is a woman who just recently retired her name is rose yoder was a great contributor to our green team she was our office manager and she was just so upset about how much energy our coffee pot was using so we reduced we got a different coffee pot a more energy efficient pick up but that wasn't enough we wanted to make sure that our coffee delivery people were actually teeming with other businesses that are along this road so that they were coming out only once a month to the street so we could reduce you know the amount of gas that was being utilized to deliver our coffee and efforts the company company didn't get it they were like but you ordered on tuesdays and she's like but you're coming down the street on wednesday so let's do it on wednesday otherwise we're pulling our contract and she was just very very diligent and so you know it's those types of things that our staff has been able to  to do utilize everything from making sure that we're working with good printing services that we are doing ordering that is green and that's been just a huge thing and it's been a way that we can rally together one of the initiatives we're most proud of and something that you all are going to have an opportunity to participate in as you finish up your lunch is here today is our recycling our triple bottom line or second program and what we've done is we decided we need to figure out how we can make sure what we're doing the way that we're generating is going to the right place so one of our good friends from town dan morris about helped us lead a dumpster dive to really evaluate our waste and rank had mentioned earlier that he was able to rip open some of the recycling bags which is great but we jumped in the dumpster the waste dumpster the landfill dumpster and sorted through what we had in there and we were really really disappointed we had a lot of stuff going into the dumpster that could have gone someplace else so we decided to review some best practices what we came up with was a need to make it easy for people to recycle and to make good decisions and to compost so we've removed almost every trash can on this campus the one from my office the one from kate's office the one from the classroom all of those are gone all of the little mini recycling containers those little blue ones and you wonder what can go in and those are gone and it's that you'll find centrally located hubs and there's one right outside the door today that has different bins that you're able everson responsible sort of recycling fashion it works because of that great thing called peer pressure right so you're standing there knew what you don't want to be a person that just structure you know fast food bag into one bin well we wanted to make sure that it was actually working so we did this and then we went back and about spot for six weeks later we jumped in the dumpster again but we had a huge huge reduction the numbers are on our site and terms of what could have been and recycle that was actually landfill abound and we took a look and we sorted and said what's actually in there and we found that there were a few pieces that people were confused on and we've done some educational pieces the say no this is where you put your big gulp container right but we wanted to make sure we were doing good work with the recycling that we were doing and we decided to partner with the home and rescue mission and this is really near and dear to our hearts because the home rescue missions new life recycling center a dozen job training things sort of the recycling goods and then they use that money to support their programming and that program again has supported a lot of our lifelong learners in this community and people have benefited from the rescue mission and this is our chance to give back they've also been great partners we said things like hey a lot of people come here and they eat chips before class and we have chip bags and we have granola bar bags and containers and we don't know what to do with those and that's like the only thing going in our trash that is and they said we'll help you find somebody you give us the bags you sort them out and we'll find a place to take care of them so when you go out today when you take your plates please make sure you go out and recycle compost noticed that there is a been specifically for chip bags and and wrappers that and if you do have a little bit of waste i think there might be a couple of man packets are mustard packets sitting around you notice that next to the bins there's a very anybody trash bin because that's about the amount of trash that we're actually producing on this campus so we're very very proud of that but we're really just happy that everybody else came out here today to participate in this community event we've had some amazing partners you've had an opportunity here for many of them there are other folks the lion's club is here working with glasses we have several office applied companies that are taking back toners and cartridges we've got a lot of different players that are out here today that are helping us out and helping this community out so if you go to our website you'll see a list of everyone who has participated and we think you offer participating and making this a great community in which to live work