Really Recycling?

Assessing results

By Paul Rosta on May 8, 2013 in News

Whether municipally mandated, LEED encouraged or for altruistic reasons, commercial property owners and managers are taking steps to encourage recycling. It can be challenging. Ultimately, it falls to the tenant and the cleaning crew—and in the case of retail properties, the general public—to comply with the program. But some creative efforts are producing results.

Office properties provide a particularly strong opportunity for managers to encourage recycling through multiple channels of contact. A comprehensive program of education for building occupants and vendors is the centerpiece of encouraging participation. Last year, SL Green Realty Corp. and its vendor, IESI Corp., held town hall meetings at more than 30 office buildings in the company’s metropolitan New York City market. They also met separately with maintenance staff at the properties. Director of sustainability Jason Black reported that materials separation improved noticeably after the meetings.

SL Green’s 2013 outreach effort will follow the town-hall format, with individual tenant meetings. Outreach also helps identify one person in every office who is willing to champion recycling and serve as the recycling liaison. Additional recycling containers are on the way, as well.

Indeed, providing plenty of collection bins goes a long way toward making recycling easy, and many owners, like Swig Equities, offer opportunities for tenants to dispose of items that are more challenging to recycle, as well. Swig’s Mills Building in San Francisco, for instance, works with Green Citizen, an environmental services company, to organize e-waste recycling drives, offer pickups of discarded electronic equipment and provide an on-site kiosk for disposal of batteries, toner cartridges, cellphones and other small items.

While incorporating spaces for recycling categories is standard practice for new building design, though, it can be more challenging to find appropriate spaces in older properties. Unlike buildings designed to accommodate recycling collection in work spaces, vintage properties were not designed to collect and store a large volume of recyclable materials.  One big challenge is how to reconfigure the Dumpsters.

The rewards for success may include LEED certification points from the U.S. Green Building Council, which promotes recycling in both new and existing properties. Cities that raise the bar higher for recycling also tend to offer financial rewards. In San Francisco, for example, owners that reduce the volume of trash by 75 percent receive a discount on the cost of waste hauling by the city’s designated vendor, Recology. That threshold will soon rise to 85 percent. In addition to materials like paper, plastics, glass and aluminum, Recology collects food waste and other compostable material. It can be difficult to measure specific savings, but Jaxon Love, sustainability manager for Shorenstein Properties L.L.C., sees a direct correlation between increased recycling and lower costs of service.

One difficulty in seeking to quantify savings is determining how full the containers are at pickup time, according to Love. To help with the process, Shorenstein’s property managers coordinate periodic audits of the waste being removed from its properties. These surveys vary by property and waste-hauling schedules, but are conducted in accordance with LEED guidelines. They provide a baseline for assessing changes in the volume of material being recycled.

But collecting materials systematically is only one aspect of a successful recycling program. The availability of hauling standards varies widely, and some situations require a degree of invention, as Jill Ziegler, Forest City Enterprises’ program manager for sustainability initiatives, found when she led an effort to bring composting to Downtown Cleveland. Two or three landfill operators were willing to accept the composting but lacked the trucks to do it. Eventually, enough customers signed on to persuade the operator to invest in a specially equipped truck.

At Forest City, executives are also considering incorporating their contractors into tracking participation efforts. The idea grew out of a company-wide mandate during the recession to buy services more cost effectively. As part of this policy, Forest City plans to switch from contracting its waste-hauling services locally to procuring a handful of national contracts. The primary goal would be to create economies of scale, but Ziegler expects that the smaller number of vendors will also be better equipped to monitor recycling patterns across a broad geographic area.

Paul Rosta is a senior editor for Commercial Property Executive. You’ll find more recycling ideas, including those for retail properties, in his article “What Goes Around …” which appeared in the April 2013 issue of CPE.