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Buying Recycled
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John Howard draws last year's winners
of the National America Recycles Day Contest. More than 140,000
entries were collected pledging to recycle and to purchase more
recycled products.
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Buying products with recycled content closes the recycling loop, because
waste materials are collected and manufactured into new products for
purchasing. It creates a market for recycling and also conserves resources,
reduces pollution and saves energy, money, and landfill space.
Under the Federal buy-recycled program, the EPA has designated specific
recycled content products for agencies to purchase. They also recommend
the levels of recycled materials that these products should contain.
Case Study: Sandia National Laboratories
Sandia National Laboratories in Albaquerque, New Mexico, has gone beyond
the typical buy recycled program to come up with a way of evaluating
potential suppliers of environmentally preferable products. They decided
to evaluate suppliers based on how well they could deliver products with
such characteristics as recycled content, energy efficiency, water efficiency,
and biobased content.
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This BioSoy hydraulic oil is made
from vegetable oils and was chosen over other non-organic chemical
products as part of Sandia’s green purchasing program.
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Based on their evaluations, the Sandia Laboratories now buy products
such as remanufactured toner cartridges, recycled paper products, BioSoy
hydraulic oil, biobased cleaning products and a range of other environmentally
preferred products.
Not only have they increased the total amount spent
on recycled content products, they have saved $72,000, whilst also
taking into account other aspects of environmental performance.
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