Job Posting: Director of Operations – Two Sides North America

The American recycling industry is in crisis — and cities are on the front lines. The big picture: The economics undergirding the U.S. recycling system have fallen apart. Unable to absorb the extra cost, some cities are opting to kill recycling programs altogether — just as public concerns about climate change are ratcheting up. China, the biggest buyer of U.S. recycled materials, has closed its doors. Before the ban, the U.S. was exporting around 70% of its waste to China. Changing consumer behaviors have made the trash-sorting process more complex and expensive. "The market for recycling has had a lot of shock," says Marian Chertow, a professor at Yale's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. "Cities are thinking, 'Hm, is this really worth it?'"

Huhtamaki and Stora Enso have joined forces to launch a new paper cup recycling initiative, The Cup Collective. The programme, which is the first of its kind in Europe, aims to recycle and capture the value of used paper cups on an industrial scale. Initially the programme will be implemented across the Benelux. With the aim of setting new standards for paper cup collection and recycling in Europe, The Cup Collective has issued an open invitation for partners from across the supply chain to get involved in working towards a systemic European solution. The EU has set recycling target for paper and board packaging of 85% by 2030. Paper cups are recyclable but need to be collected before they can be turned into new paper products. The Cup Collective initiative will create the necessary collection infrastructure to significantly increase the recycling rate of wood-fiber in paper cups. Above all, the programme will make it as easier for consumers and businesses to collect used paper cups to be regenerated into valuable recycled raw material.

A story started making the rounds last week about French energy regulators asking companies to cut back on email in order to save energy. It sort of sounds like a satirical piece — it did, in fact, end up in Reddit’s “Not the Onion” subsection — but the suggestion really does come from the French regulator RTE. Which got us thinking: How do our tech habits affect how much power we use and the environment? Finding an answer is harder than you may think. After all, the energy you use at your desk writing a typical email isn’t all the energy that an email uses. As the French warning indicates, there’s a whole infrastructure behind every message, which includes not only the electricity you use but also the energy it takes to store and transmit that information through data centers. Many researchers have looked into the carbon footprint of these types of technology — meaning the amount of greenhouse gas produced to support the activity — to measure the impact they have on the environment. This is commonly expressed in the volume of carbon dioxide. Using more energy tends to produce a larger greenhouse gas emission, but using alternative forms of energy that don't burn greenhouse gasses can also reduce a technology's carbon footprint. click Read More below for more of the story