Often, to make a difference for the community you have to think a little out of the box. For us, it’s investing in recycling and putting our passion for the environment above an immediate profit.
Many Tulsans already know about our brand new Hybrid Material Recovery Facility (Mr. Murph) we designed and built last year at American Waste Control. With it, we’re now able to process and reclaim over 80 tons of recyclables a day including plastics, aluminum, cardboard, and paper. It’s been a huge success.
So successful, in fact, we’ve just installed what we call a Clean MRF to help us separate out glass and other presorted comingled waste that our hybrid MRF just can’t process. The investment is helping us with the tremendous volume of daily waste material we receive from the recycling contract we have for Tulsa. We’re proud to say, our rate of recycling city-wide is at an all time high.
Despite this success, however, I’m often asked the question of why my company bothers to recycle in the first place. How can it be worth the roughly ten million-dollar price tag we’ve invested in equipment and automation to make it worthwhile?
My answer is pretty frank and straightforward. Recycling for us has never been solely about driving revenue. Strange for a company to say. But, our mission is to do everything we can to care for our environment and make the community better as a whole.
Recycling plays a big part in our business strategy in that it’s an idea based on passion rather than profit. We know if we invest now, keeping our eye on the bigger environmental picture, it will pay off greatly for our community later on.
It may sound corny, even crazy to people, but, that, in a nutshell, is why we invest so much in recycling technology and implementing programs to get people recycling. To make our community better.
Seeing it in real time means looking no further than your neighborhood. We’re recycling more than ever thanks to the advanced automation of our new MRFs and increased efficiency. Our recycling rates are soaring and everyday we’re lessening our impact on the environment.
We’re seeing a terrific return on our investment and it’s measured in improved lives. More recyclables, more jobs, reduced landfills, less pollution—and we’re just getting started.
It may be unconventional and out of the box, but the results are real-life and tangible. Our quality of life is improving as a community. And, I personally can’t think of a better payoff than that.
