Buying Recycled

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.

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.

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.

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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