My guest today is Brenda Pulley,Senior Vice President, Recycling, for Keep America Beautiful. Brenda joined Keep America Beautiful in October 2010 to develop, execute, and expand America Recycles Day, an annual event that is happening this Friday, November 15. Keep America Beautiful is collaborating on this campaign with the Ad Council—the nation’s largest producer of public service advertising. Brenda also supports other recycling programs and connects with Washington-based stakeholders. In this role, she identifies and develops strategies for policy issues key to Keep America Beautiful, its mission and members. Brenda began her nearly 30-year career working for the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Environmental Small Business Committee. In addition to her work on Capitol Hill, she has also worked for both corporations and trade associations. Brenda also serves on the Board of Directors of R2 Solutions – the organization charged with promoting environmentally responsible practices throughout the electronics recycling industry. www.americarecyclesday.org and www.kab.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Recycling & Buying Recycled Products Helps Reduce Toxics
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Brenda Pulley
Date of Broadcast: November 11, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.
Today is Monday, November 11, 2013, and we’re having a beautiful autumn day here in Clearwater, Florida.
Today, we’re going to talk about something a little different. Usually, we talk about toxic chemicals that we’re being exposed to in our own homes, or as we’re going about our daily lives, and how they’re toxic, how they can affect our lives, and what we can do instead.
Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s a little less direct, but is affecting us nonetheless. And that is about how recycling and buying recycled products can help reduce our exposure to toxic chemicals.
Now, that may sound like, “What’s toxic about recycled products, or what’s safer about recycled products?”
But the thing is that there are things about recycled products that actually involve toxic chemicals, which we’re going to find out about today. And that by doing these things, whether it’s recycling something that you could recycle instead of throwing it in the trash or the landfill, or by buying a recycling product, you can help reduce the amount of toxic chemicals that are in our environment that may come back to you in breathing the air, drinking the water, or eating food that has been grown in the environment.
Now, we’re going this today because this Friday, November 15th, is America Recycles Day. It’s an event that happens every year to educate Americans about recycling because it seems that not everybody is yet recycling, so we’re going to learn about this today.
My guest is Brenda Pulley. She’s the Senior Vice President of Recycling for Keep America Beautiful.
Brenda joined Keep America Beautiful in 2010 to develop, execute and expand America’s [inaudible 00:02:01].
Thanks for being with me, Brenda.
BRENDA PULLEY: Debra, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you.
DEBRA: Well, tell us more about—let’s start with tell us about Keep America Beautiful.
BRENDA PULLEY: Sure. Keep America Beautiful has been around for 60 years. In fact, we’re celebrating our 60th year anniversary this year. We started as an anti-litter organization back then, and took on those issues for several years.
We have affiliates located in communities across the country and various partners, so we have over a thousand affiliates and partners that we work with. And we’re all about bringing people together in their respective communities, and working with them, engaging them, to help make their community, what I call, their common environment—cleaner, greener and better.
DEBRA: I remember when I was a kid—I’m almost 60, so I remember when I was a kid, and I remember those commercials about not littering, and I remember that phrase, “Keep America beautiful.”
So when I heard it again in association with recycling, I thought, “Well, this is just the newer version of what you’ve been doing for a very long time.”
So thank you so much for having that organization, and being part of it, and making less litter on the highways, and in our towns, and all those places, and whether it goes into the garbage or whether it goes into recycling.
It’s all about putting our trash in the right place, and not just throwing it around the environment.
BRENDA PULLEY: It is exactly like you say it. We still need to work in every community across the country to make sure that litter is picked up, and that litter is prevented. And that’s one thing I say about recycling and waste production or recycling.
It is what I call a preventive maintenance to littering, so you’re exactly right. Thank you.
DEBRA: Yes, I see the connection. And I’m thinking about particularly all those soda cans. Those are something that could easily be recycled. But I think that a lot of people, especially people of my age, that saw those commercials [inaudible 00:04:14] they really stuck.
I just want to let you know that they really made an impression on me. And in fact, I have a friend, one friend in particular, who, every time she sees a piece of litter, she picks it up. And she picks it, and she recycles is or puts it in the trash because she’s just taking responsibility for other people not doing that.
And as we walk down the street, she’ll just pick up the litter. And I think that’s very admirable and something other people could be doing as well.
BRENDA PULLEY: Those are the ambassadors we rely on, frankly. And there’s nothing like creating that example that she has. That’s actually exactly what we want to do with the recycling these days, is how do you create that example that social norm where recycling is just the natural thing for all of us to do.
DEBRA: Well, one of the things that I learned a number of years ago, I went to Germany for the first time. Germany is an interesting place because I went there in 1990, before we had anything green here. And in Germany, I was very surprised to see that there are recycling bins on every street corner.
So where we have public trashcans, and in some places we have recycling bins, but they have them everywhere, and they’re divided into glass, paper, metal.
And when you’re done with your soda can or your paper plate, or whatever, it just goes straight into the recycling bin.
I would like to see more of that in America because I think that the reason that some people don’t recycle is that they may be have more to recycle, but it’s difficult to do that.
BRENDA PULLEY: Well, I share that objective with you. And there are a lot of reasons we can talk about why other countries have much more infrastructure and much more of a culture recycling than we’ve developed here in the United States.
But I would like to say it’s one of those things that we, Keep America Beautiful, and I think even as a country, are working on.
DEBRA: I think so too.
BRENDA PULLEY: First and foremost, it’s about making recycling convenient. And that means having that recycling bin, whether it’s at home or at work or at school, or as we say, you just point it out, when you’re out and about.
Particularly, we’re much more on-the-go society. And so we’re generating that soda can, that fastfood packaging. We’re generating it when we’re out and about. And so we want to be able, in those locations, to make it very easy and convenient for people to recycle.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree. And I just want to mention because this is something that I found out recently—the other day, I went to Best Buy, and I mentioned this on the show before, but I want to say it on this show.
I went to Best Buy, and when I just walked in the door, they had all these banners, very clearly marked about being able to recycle electronic-oriented things like cords and cell phones and things like that.
You can just walk in the door, and put it in the bin.
And I happen go there because I needed to buy a new mouse for my computer. And so I brought it with me, and even though there wasn’t a bin for mice, when I bought the new mouse, I gave the old one to the cashier, and she took it for recycling.
And I think that’s a wonderful, responsible thing to do. And I also had another guest on when we were talking about taking back pharmaceuticals, and keeping those out of the environment, and how we need to have more programs for recycling pharmaceuticals.
So this whole thing about recycling, really, as we will see today, will keep toxic [inaudible 00:07:46] out of the environment.
Brenda, before we go to the break, could you just tell us for a minute about how you personally got interested in recycling.
BRENDA PULLEY: I think similar to you—growing up in the 70’s, I would say, was when we really saw that first Earth Day come about. In fact, Keep America Beautiful and [inaudible 00:08:06] were both engaged in that—releasing one of the most famous commercials of the crying Indian.
DEBRA: I remember that.
BRENDA PULLEY: And I [inaudible 00:08:11] also, when my own home life, just being part of that culture, and being exposed to nature, and preserving, and the things that we could do to be much more conserving. I think it was instilled in me early on, and then having it reinforced from a society standpoint in the 70’s. I think it really made an impression on me.
And so my work—I worked for the US House of Representatives for years. And then since then, there are significant energy, environmental issues, that we have as a society. But having said that there’s so much opportunity, of things that we can do to become more energy-efficient with things like recycling where we can really preserve our natural resources and things like that.
So I think, for me, that was the personal passion, and then seeing the opportunity of how to make a difference.
DEBRA: Great. Well, we need to go to break in just a few seconds. And so we’ll talk more about this when we come back. My guest today is Brenda Pulley, Senior Vice President of Recycling for Keep America Beautiful.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be back after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking about how recycling and buying recycled products can reduce the overall toxics in the world. They may not make a difference to us much, although sometimes, it can, in the particular products we’re being exposed to, but how it can make a difference in the overall environment.
And my guest today is Brenda Pulley. She’s the Senior Vice President in Recycling from Keep America Beautiful.
Well, Brenda, let’s talk about recycling now.
So the biggest thing that I think is the thing that’s related to toxic chemical exposures is the fact that if you collect material, and then recycle it into a new product, there’s a tremendous amount of energy savings. So could you tell us about that?
BRENDA PULLEY: There is a tremendous amount of energy savings. When we think cumulative—so just take, we’re at EPA estimates, that we’re at a national recycling rate of about 34%. If you take out, what we call green waste, so grass clippings and things like that. So think of packaging and other things, and electronics you talk about, we’re at a 24%/25% recycling rate.
But of that 34% recycling rate, that’s energy equivalent of savings of nearly 230-million barrels of oil.
DEBRA: That’s huge.
BRENDA PULLEY: It’s huge. And it’s hard for me to comprehend that. So good old EPA even translates that into—but that’s really the equivalent of an annual energy consumption of nearly 15-million homes in the U.S.
So I know I throw a lot of numbers at you, but it is just what I believe people with the impression of, if there are in almost every situation of what can be recycled. There is significant energy savings by recycling.
And I would say, I worked for several years in the aluminum industry, and that aluminum can that you referred to earlier, when you recycle that aluminum can, there is literally going from can to can, it’s 80% energy efficiency saved there from doing this.
It’s a much easier streamline system to take a can and re-melt it down versus mining all that raw material and processing all that raw material into finish aluminum.
So a lot of facts, but [inaudible 00:11:48] point significant, significant energy savings.
DEBRA: So if people are saving energy, would you happen to know what are the toxic chemicals that are not being released into the environment?
BRENDA PULLEY: I would just say, I’m not sure which ones to label toxic or not. So please, you can name some of them for me.
DEBRA: Pollutants, whether they’re toxic or not.
BRENDA PULLEY: Yes. Look, where do you get your energy from? It’s either oil, or it’s generated by using coal, or natural gas. All the emissions, as many as [inaudible 00:12:27] that there are these days, all the emissions related to that can occur on a much significantly lower level.
That’s one. But for aluminum, it’s literally—there’s a lot of box site mining that must go on. And again, whether all kinds of control is in place from the mining and the processing, all those natural resources that don’t have to be mined and certain air emissions released, or just even the ground disturbed. Think of the dust that’s released, or the electricity that has to be generated, and all the releases related to that.
That’s how I think about all those different points in the manufacturing process that now don’t have to take place because we’re recycling materials.
Now, having said that, we’ve got to look at the recycling process, and there are certain controls and measures in place to make sure that the recycling process is also done in a very safe and efficient way.
DEBRA: Now, tell us about that.
BRENDA PULLEY: Well, let’s take electronics. You referred to that earlier. And we all have—it’s estimated 60-million to 100-million phones that we all have stored in our drawers, or in the cabinets, or in the basement [inaudible 00:13:48] just cell phones annually that are not being recycled.
And they have short, useful lives these days, since we all like the newest and greatest phone.
But electronics recycling is really one of those things that not only all the emissions that we just talked about that have to be generated when you manufacture new electronics. So it’s a lot of metals—it’s lead, it’s cadmium, mercury in some instances, so that’s less and less.
But it’s also more precious metals, if you will, that when they’re recycled, one of the things the industry have made great advancements in over the last five-plus years is making sure that they are now particularly globally, and more controls in place, to make sure that when those recyclables are processed—sometimes, many of the equipment can be refurbished and reused.
But now, they’re going to recycle it.
There are many instances where particularly in developing countries, there are not the appropriate controls in place, and there can be burning, for example, uncontrolled burning if you will, to extract some of the metals and things out of that.
So the industry is taking great strides at not only in the U.S., but developing global standards to put in place protections and criteria [inaudible 00:15:00] no longer happens.
So it is important for all of us, [inaudible 00:15:05] we’re going to recycle your electronics, so taking them to somewhere like Best Buy, or Staples, or your community electronic collection day. Those are instances where you can [inaudible 00:15:16] pretty assured that they’re being handled properly. But if there are other avenues that you want to get your material recycled, it’s very important to check and make sure that they’re validated and they’re licensed—there are some third party certifiers out there now.
And it’s important, and I encourage all your listeners to make sure a) to recycle, particularly your electronics, but to make sure that they’re turning them over properly.
And therefore, I would also say not only all the emissions that we just talked about, but proper data management is another issue.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree. And I think that part of it, about switching to having what we could probably call a recycling mindset, is to get out of the habit of just tossing things in the garbage can, and paying attention to what it is that we are actually throwing away.
And I found that as I have more awareness of that, then it’s not difficult to decide—I have a basket that’s just for paper, so that I don’t even have to sort my trash. This is the paper basket, and I have a bin that the city gives me, and I just put my recyclables that go to the city like a can—I have hardly any cans at all, but like a plastic tub from yogurt or something.
It just goes straight into the recycling bin, and I think that part of it [inaudible 00:16:43] with awareness and changing our habits.
We need to go to break again, but we’ll be right back. I’m talking with Brenda Pulley, Senior Vice President of Recycling from Keep America Beautiful. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Brenda Pulley, Senior Vice President of Recycling for Keep America Beautiful. And we’re talking about how recycling can reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals.
Let’s see. What else should we talk about?
Let’s talk about recycling some other kinds of products that may be related to toxic exposures. One would be plastic, and another would be motor oil.
BRENDA PULLEY: Again, in each of those instances, there are many benefits to reusing and recycling them.
So let’s take our plastic bags. It took me several times, walking into that grocery store to remember to go back in my car and get that reusable bag. And it’s something I wanted to do. So it is something that we all have to work on and to be encouraged to.
And so where we can reduce and where we can recycle, I do want to encourage all your listeners, there are many benefits to doing it. And you’re pointing out one of the great aspects of how it really reduces emissions and toxics that we get exposed to every day.
So if you think of used oil, for years, it’s actually an issue I worked on when I worked for the U.S. House of Representatives.
People commonly would take used oil and pour it to kill certain kinds of weeds and things like that. And frankly, it’s one of the worst things that you can do because it leeches into the water system, which we drink.
And so the good news is over the last 20/30 years, there have been big messages for people that still—and there’s a large percentage of people that still recycle their—or I should say, change their own oils from their automobiles, from their lawnmowers, so those kinds of things, but at least there are many more places where they can take that used oil back, and get it recycled.
And in fact, it is now common for it to be re-refined into new used oil.
It’s taken years for that to happen, a lot of effort, but that is now used for used oil.
DEBRA: I think that that’s what we need to be changing our minds—the way we view this whole thing. There’s a wonderful, wonderful book—I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, called “Cradle to Cradle.” It’s been around for a long time, by William McDonough.
And in this book, he explains how nature, the environment, is just one huge recycling factory because everything, if you just think of it in terms of a tree, then in the spring, a tree grows new green leaves, and the leaves do their thing, photosynthesis and all these things.
And then in the fall, if you have a citrus tree, the leaves turn colors, and they drop off the tree.
But what happens next is that those leaves, when they go down into the ground, is that all the little microorganisms and the earthworms and everything come and break down the leaves into nutrients, which then go into the soil, which then feeds the tree to be able to produce a new crop of leaves.
That’s recycling.
BRENDA PULLEY: It absolutely is.
DEBRA: It’s inherent in nature. And so what William McDonough and his co-authors are saying that is that we should be doing like trees do, and that everything should be able to go back into the system and get recycled into a new product.
Now, we’re a long way from that. But if we start thinking in those terms, then we would have an abundance of materials to make into products instead of depleting our resources.
And certainly, recycling also includes, as you said, reuse and reduce, as well as recycle. That’s the first thing that we want to do. What’s even better than recycle is to reuse something, whether that’s—just like I cut up the backs of papers, if I print something out, and I don’t send it someplace off my computer, then I just put it in a pile, and if I need notepads to take notes, write down messages from a telephone or something, I just cut those pieces of paper in quarters, and I have a little basket that I put it in, and that’s how I make my notepads.
I don’t go to a store and buy a notepad. I can make the notepad. I reuse my jars.
All of these things, every time we reuse something in our houses, or any in our places of work, we’re, again, cutting back on the amount of energy even more because it takes zero energy to make a notepad out of a piece of paper that would have gone in the trash.
And then the more uses you get out of these things, the less and less energy we’re using, and the cleaner and cleaner our air will be, the cleaner our environment will be, just by taking these simple steps at home.
BRENDA PULLEY: And I would say that’s a great example. It’s all of us thinking about what we can do, what steps we can take, and knowing that those small steps cumulative help truly make a big difference.
So we talked about the energy benefits of recycling, and one more I would put out there are climate change related issues, such as carbon dioxide. Just the recycling that occurs today in the U.S. with that 34% recycling rate, believe or not, that recycling avoids emissions of greenhouse gases that are equivalent to taking 35-million cars off the road for a year.
So again, you’re talking about all the reduction that doesn’t have to happen, all the releases of various emissions and those kinds of things, [inaudible 00:23:07] air, in our water, or the land that don’t have to happen when we recycle and recycle properly.
DEBRA: I also want to mention, again, from Cradle to Cradle, that when people are designing products, it’s important to design them in a way that all the materials can be recycled, and for us, as consumers, to think about, are we buying products and packaging that can be recycled, for example.
I think, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, I think those aseptic boxes, those juice boxes, I think they can’t be recycled because there are layers, and they would have to be taken apart, the aluminum part, taken off the plastic part that something like a glass bottle, you just take the lid off, and you drink it or eat it or whatever, and then toss the glass bottle into the recycling.
But something like an aseptic package is very, very difficult to recycle. And if we start thinking about, at the beginning, how we’re going to recycle and reuse that material at the end, that’s something to consider. And I think that as we all start becoming more aware of these things that the world will change for the better.
This is just the right thing to be doing.
BRENDA PULLEY: You touched on so many points that I want to address, and one is, again, we have conversations all the time with manufacturers. They’re starting to look now more, what we call, a life cycle of a product. And your point about now, not only looking it in the life what happens, and what can be reclaimed and reused, but also, looking at the front end when designing that product or packaging to be thinking of what materials, what designs do you use, so they can be recycled at the end of life.
So there’s a plastic bottle out there right now that has full plastic wrap, but the recycling process can’t read and know where to put that recycled bottle. So the industry is working on how they can change that so the recycling process can, in fact, read it.
Or if you look at products, like you said, and there’s more and more effort looking at how can we better label products, so all of us when we go to purchase something, know that [inaudible 00:25:23].
DEBRA: I’m a big one about changing labeling, but we’ll talk about that more after the break.
BRENDA PULLEY: I’d love to.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’re talking about recycling with Brenda Pulley from Keep America Beautiful. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Brenda Pulley from Keep America Beautiful. And we’re talking about recycling.
Brenda, you wanted to say something about labeling.
BRENDA PULLEY: I think you raised a couple of products that when you go to purchase, having that information about—one is, is it recyclable or not. But also, we know from surveys that individuals are interested in knowing if it has recycled content or not.
There’s so much that needs to go on a label, but like you, it’s a topic that truly interests me, so that consumers are aware when they go to purchase something, how to recycle it, and if it contains recycled contents, so we can close that loop you mentioned.
DEBRA: We do need to know about both ends. We need to know if it can be recycled. We need to know how much recycled content there is, so that we can make that choice.
I just think that consumers should have as much information as possible, and I think there are critical things, and I think the recycling information is one of those. The other thing is that I think we need to have a big revamp of how toxic products get labeled.
And I know that’s not a recycling issue here. But I think in terms of labeling, we just don’t have enough information. And I think that if the toxic ingredients of consumer products will really put on the labels, the people would stop buying them in droves because they would know instead of just looking at a label, and seeing nothing.
BRENDA PULLEY: You raise a very good point. Particularly, toxics, the way that you’re researching them and looking at them, it does get very complicated. But we do know some information that can and should [inaudible 00:27:39] be shared with the general public.
And frankly, we have some of that in recycling. It happens to be a complicated issue and very local issue. And so part of the task is encouraging people, so that they want to recycle, making it convenient, and then making the information for their unique community easily available for them, so they know how to recycle.
DEBRA: Yes, I totally agree. So I want to ask you a toxics question actually about recycled products because recycled content sounds like a good thing, and it is a good thing to recycle. But what if you’re recycling something that’s toxic?
Now, some of those recycled things, those plastic containers like, I think it’s #5 PVC. PVC is a toxic plastic. And you can recycle it, and it can be recycled any number of times. But it’s still a toxic plastic.
So do you have any comment about toxics in recycling like that? That’s just an example.
BRENDA PULLEY: I’m not as familiar, and I probably should be, with that one particularly. But I think also, as we talked earlier about manufactures looking at how products are made, and what goes in the products, that on their radar screen—I come, very specifically, from a recycling angle. You come in also from the toxic angle.
But if they can look at a host of those issues, and look at how to reduce things like toxicity factors that are going into them, or other factors that create all kinds of air emissions or other things, if they can reduce the use of those, and advocating for that, it’s an important thing to do.
So in my industry, it’s also not just about recyclability, but it’s also about light weighting, so it’s the use of less material to begin with.
So those are some steps that are being taken, but I know when you look at it particularly from a toxicity angle, are there ways to look at, can you avoid use of a certain material or not, and to continue to push for that and get it on the radar screen, I think it’s very important.
DEBRA: I think so too. And another one that falls in that category, for me, is recycled paper. What I want to say about this first is that sometimes, the issue is that we just don’t have enough information, as you said. And so my question that comes up about recycled paper often is, well, paper itself is just cellulose from trees. There’s nothing about paper that is a problem.
But then there are bleaches and there are inks. Some of those inks have lead in them, especially the colored ones. There are VOCs, all kinds of things in ink that is a big problem.
So then you recycle that paper, and what happens to those inks and metals and things? Are the recycling processes for paper set up to remove those kinds of things? I just don’t know the answer to that. And you may not either.
BRENDA PULLEY: But I actually have some familiarity with that. And you’re right. That is part of the process that we should think about. It’s not just the recycling benefits, but making sure the recycling process is also properly handled.
I can tell you that 20/30 years ago, it was not as much as it needed to be. And today, [inaudible 00:31:00] and emission controls, as I’ve said earlier on, air or water releases, or land releases—not that there’s not more to do, but I can tell you that there are many more controls than there were 20 and 30 years ago because we have had agencies, both the Federal EPA, and local governments, that now have looked and put in place controls on those kinds of things.
I used to represent the solvent recyclers. And so there were all kinds of air emission controls on them, as there should have been when it came to recycling, to make sure that those VOCs were captured.
DEBRA: Yes, they should be. And this is one of the things that, again, in Cradle to Cradle, they talk about that there may be a place for toxic chemicals. As much as it made me cringe when I read that, I have to agree with them.
That if toxic chemicals can be contained so that we’re not being exposed to them—and I think an example would be Freon or something, that would be used as a coolant. If it was contained, if it was collected, and if it was recycled, then use of that toxic chemical wouldn’t affect health or the environment, and it would be able to be used in a beneficial way but that’s not what we’re doing now.
So we just need to be, I think, as a culture, we need to be thinking about what kinds of steps do we need to be taking, so that we can all be living in a more responsible way, and have an agreement between consumers, regulators, manufacturers, and organizations, so that these things happen all down the line, whether we’re talking about recycling or reducing toxics, or any other issue that benefits our health and the environment.
It really is a cooperation between all those different levels, and that sometimes, like I know for example, I want to have chickens in my backyard, but I can’t because it’s illegal where I live. And astonishing as that sounds, I had some chickens. I [inaudible 00:33:00] and put chickens in my backyard, and the police came and took them away.
So that’s not a support of law. That law does not support life. But that’s what we need to be looking at, is are our regulations, our laws, our actions, are all the pieces of our society agreed and aligned on getting these kinds of things in that help all of us.
BRENDA PULLEY: An interesting point you raised because it is, how can we all work together and partner, so that we can figure out how to minimize or to find complimentary way. [inaudible 00:33:35] is generated, it can be positively used.
DEBRA: Yes, absolutely. Well, Brenda, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. We only have just a few minutes left of the show. Are there any final words that you’d like to say? Anything that you haven’t said that you want to say?
BRENDA PULLEY: I appreciate the opportunity. One thing is—to reassure people that materials, it is worth recycling for all the reasons that we’ve talked about, whether it’s energy and environmental and the toxics reduced in our society, the waste that’s reduced. It really is worth recycling in so many instances.
And in those materials where it’s not yet, progress continues to be made, technology gets sophisticated more and more to where materials can be economically and environmentally safely recycled.
And so that would be my one thing of encouragement to share with you and your listeners, is the importance of, and that it’s beneficial too. You can really give new life to something when it is recycled.
And if they need more information, we did just launch a new ad campaign with the ad counsel, so if they can go to IWanToBeRecycled.org, and there’s information there on what can be recycled, and where to find recycling.
DEBRA: I went to that site. It’s really cute. There’s one about—there’s a picture of a plastic, a bench or something, and it says, “I want to be recycled.”
BRENDA PULLEY: Yes, it does. And that is to show people how it really is worth doing. You’re raising a set of unique issues about why it’s important. At the end of the day, there’s just a multitude of benefits to recycle, and we encourage people to do so.
DEBRA: There are. And do you want to give a plug for America Recycles Day? People can go to AmericaRecyclesDay.org to find out more about that, but there is anything special happening on the 15th?
BRENDA PULLEY: Listen, there are events across the country happening. That’s wonderful. It’s great to see all people that are very interested, and they want to share recycling in their community.
Literally, there are events going on across the country. From Washington D.C. tomorrow, we’re going to be on the National Mall, and down on the Business District, getting people caught in the act of recycling and inviting them to take the “I Recycle” pledge.
Or LA Live out in Los Angeles, there are going to be big events out there all day long with electronics collection, and at the game that night, there will be people getting caught recycling.
So literally, across the country, there are wonderful events occurring, and we encourage people to go to our site and take the America Recycles Day pledge, please.
DEBRA: Yes, I encourage that too. I think it’s a great idea.
Thanks so much, Brenda, and have a wonderful America Recycles Day and thanks for being on the show.
BRENDA PULLEY: Thank you, Debra. Keep up the good work. Thank you.
DEBRA: Thank you. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. If you’d like to know more about this show, if you’d like to listen to other shows with other guests, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Every Monday, I post the new guest for the week, so you could go there right now, and find out who else is going to be on this week.
And you could go to the archives and listen to—there’s more than a hundred shows archived there. You can also, across the top, there’s a menu where you can find out more about how to find non-toxic products. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
