Recycle Match: The eBay of Recycling?

Waste. Every company creates it, in some form or another. For some materials, the path to recycling is clear – paper, plastics, and industry specific waste that has a known reuse within your sector or a related one.

But what about the less obvious materials, the ones for which you have no feasible reuse, and therefore pay disposal fess, month after month? Is that the end of story, a “necessary evil” you must resign yourself to?

Not if Recycle Match can help it. Much like eBay has created a global market on the consumer items that previously sat in people’s homes or were thrown away, Recycle Match seeks to match up those who generate either one-time or regular streams of hard-to-recycle materials, with those seeking that material for their own use.

The source company gets revenue from that which they previously paid to have taken away, and the recipient finds a resource they need, likely at a lower cost, and definitely with less of an impact on the environment.

What does Recycle Match get out of it?

It makes a profit per matched companies, rather than charging for the overall search process. One could reasonably wonder, why can’t companies do this for themselves? A good point, yet I recall having a friend working in an automotive upholstery company that serviced Toyota, and though it actively sought options out to recycle everything it didn’t use, often had difficulties with certain materials, and eventually gave up. It took them a lot of time and energy to find, and at times re-find recycling options, as there wasn’t always a long term need for the materials.

When you have a larger community of companies, in industries that you may not have thought would have a need for what you don’t, there’s an increased likelihood that your “waste” will find a buyer, the effort, time, and cost minimized to make it happen. What’s sitting around at your company? Perhaps it’s time to give Recycle Match a try.

See the article at: http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/01/recycle-match-the-ebay-of-recycling/