Closing the Loop: Buy Recycled-Procurement Track

Kate Lutz , Conference Organizer, SCCED: Welcome, you are the people that get the importance of buying recycled. Together we are building the bridge to the 21st century sustainability.

Kathleen Gildred , Executive Director, SCCED: We have an exciting day planned. We have a vendor show with 20 vendors on the promenade. The maintenance track will have hands on demonstrations of recycled products. This year's theme of America Recycles Day theme is, "If you're not buying recycled, you're not really recycling."

SCCED's mission is to help create a sustainable future for Southern California. That is why we are so concerned about closing the loop in waste management. We plan to support you over the next year in this process, getting model resolutions to you, bid specs, vendor information, and information on buying coops and piggy-back buying opportunities. We want to support you in creating dialogue in your agencies, so you can work as a team to promote this concept. Let us know how we can support you.

I want to thank our sponsors that helped to make this event possible and our many co-sponsors. I also want to thank the Conference Task Force.

The Santa Monica Sustainable City Program has been recognized by the US EPA as a national leader. We are pleased to have Craig Perkins here to tell us how Santa Monica has done it.

I don't know more about buying recycled than a lot of you, but I do know a lot about what is takes to do the right thing in local government. My main message is this: " If you implement all the buy recycled programs, that's not good enough ." We need to see the big picture about how to be environmentally smart . We not only need to buy recycled goods, we need to buy less toxic goods, ones that emit fewer air and water pollutants, and are less destructive to the environment. We need to look at cleaning products, carpets, etc. in terms of reducing the amount of dangerous emissions into the workplace.

We need to look at our opportunities to buy alternatively fueled vehicles. We need to look at buying electricity produced from renewable resources. A few weeks ago our City Council made the policy decision to purchase 100% of our municipal electricity from renewable generation sources. We issued a request for proposals this week. We also hope to offer this "green" electricity to businesses and individuals in our community.

You are here because you are a change agent or a potential change agent for your organization. You need to fight within your organization to do the right thing -- to be environmentally smart. If no one else is doing a job that needs to be done, then it is your job to do it. I believe that life is too short to take the path of least resistance.

A friend of mine has a saying, "We can either entertain ourselves to extinction or we can educate ourselves to enlightenment." I hope you can think outside the box, push the envelope and have fun doing it.

Gildred: King County, Washington established its recycled procurement program in 1989, hired Eric Nelson and won the Procurement Award of the National Recycling Coalition in 1990.

In 1989 the County adopted an ordinance requiring all of its agencies to buy products made of recycled materials "wherever practicable." They hired me to implement the policy. I was confused then and I am still confused today as to what that means. And we still don't have a list of all the recycled products available.

In 1990 when we started, we first looked to US EPA and asked them for a list of all recycled products, but the EPA didn't have it.

Sometimes when we are given policy directives, we don't know how to implement them. It is sometimes referred to as "management by wishful thinking." So you get your best people in a room, give them an assignment and come back in a month or a year and see what they have come up with. Encouraging environmentally preferable behaviors is difficult because there are no magic answers.

Good contract language is helpful , because when we get work done in government, it is by contracts. Where we have structured the language in those contracts correctly, we have brought about some significant accomplishments.

The key to change is the users of the products. A good way to start is to have a staff meeting with the users, because we have all the tools we need in that room. We don't have to wait for anyone like the EPA to come up with the right answers for us.

In our 1998 report of our recycled products program, we found that in 1995 we bought $2.5 million of recycled products, and $0.8 million of environmentally preferable products.

Relative to purchasing decision-making, government is organized differently from the private sector, but the needs of the users are the same, we all have to do similar things. In government we have an opportunity to put policy in place to direct the behavior of the employees.

Relative to the policy, start with a clear and simple policy, such as, "All employees will buy and use recycled materials wherever practical." Our first policy was 38 pages of details, but it didn't make sense to many of our users. Now our policy is only 4 pages (a copy is available on our website).

You need a centralized person who can scan the horizon to meet and talk with people and identify areas of opportunity, and carry the information out to each agency. Essentially, our job is marketing, we try to convince people to use products they have never heard of and are not sure they will work, and we don't have ready answers for them. A Sears marketing manager once said, "Marketing is simple. You find out what your customers need, find the product that will meet that need, and then tell them you have it."

The King County Environmental Purchasing Program was placed inside the purchasing agency, but that was essentially an arbitrary decision, we could have been anywhere. There is not a special advantage in being in the purchasing agency.

The purchasing agency's job is to acquire the right products at the right time, but it is not to make decisions for the people that actually do the services. In our program, we assemble information, deliver that information to the users and advocate for the use of those products. We suggest something and sometimes they tell us to go away, but we keep coming back. So be persistent, but not a nag. You need to have the users report what they are doing to the person with the responsibility for overseeing the policy.

We assemble information about products, vendors, contacts and user experiences and get it out to the users. Much of this information is brand new. As someone once said, "If all you do is what you have already done, all you will get is what you've already got."

Start with small things that are easy, that make performance sense and save money. This has helped us establish good relationships with our 12,000 employees. We have connection points within each of the subagencies. When we go out, we take very specific product information.

In the early days, a County agency put out bus panels that said, "Buy Recycled." The problem is that doesn't mean much to many people. Avoid vague concepts and get to the real products.

An obstacle is over-hyped marketing misinformation from new environmental companies. We must not push products on people that might not work or cost too much.

You can't sit in your office and make it happen. You have to make it everybody's business, make environmental values a part of the culture of the entire organization.

In conclusion, we need to have a policy to have our city be environmentally responsible, put someone in the center of implementing that policy, and engage the users in the uations of the products.

As Margaret Mead said, "Never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

For more information, see the King County website, www.metrokc.gov/procure/green which has information we have found about recycled products. We put the information on our website and tell our agencies to look it up. You can email me at eric.nelson@metrokc.gov and I can put you on the email list for our Procurement Bulletin.

Nelson: Our policy requires all agencies to name a person in their unit to interact with our program, take information from us, uate that information, use the products (if it make sense), and report the results back to us. The reporting function is a major motivating factor, because our Annual Report goes to the County Council, and no agency wants to sees themselves reported as not cooperating.

Nelson: We found fresh aggregate was being used in many applications, such as road bedding, landfills, etc., but we found we could successfully use aggregate from broken up roads. In 1997 we saved $20,000 from aggregate, $300,000 from toner cartridges. We use wood waste to make ground mulch. We also use plastic lumber; we rubberize roads, and retread tires.

Nelson: We do identify who sells what products, but we don't put that into a big directory. Instead, we package information for a specific user's needs.

Nelson: We are both centralized and decentralized. The decisions on what to buy rest with the users, but the buyer helps the users make good decisions. If people make the wrong decision, we can't overrule them.

Nelson: We have a 15% price preference for recycled paper, so we have no problem in buying it. We also have a 10% preference for re-refined motor oil.

Nelson: I believe that is happening. But I believe there are additional startup costs for new products, and that was the philosophy behind our decision.