n eight months, Redwood Plastics and Rubber’s flagship branch in Langley, BC, Canada, transformed itself from having no recycling initiatives in place to recycling over 89,000 pounds of our most common polymers. For the success of our recycling initiatives, we were awarded the IAPD’s Environmental Excellence Silver Award, an accomplishment we credit to our employees at all levels following IAPD’s guidelines (see IAPD’s Recycling Best Practices).
We started our recycling journey with the creation of our Green Team: a collection of employees with unique skillsets from various organizational levels that would help build our recycling initiative. In order to build an effective plan that aligned with our organizational values, we first defined what “green” meant to us: reducing landfill waste, lowering our carbon footprint, promoting eco-conscious business ideas and partnering with certified green customers and vendors. With these values in mind, our Green Team created a comprehensive plan that engaged employees at all levels by establishing short-term and long-term goals, determining barriers, building a budget, identifying the necessary resources and forging partnerships with green customers and vendors.
“Redwood’s eight-month transformation shows what can be accomplished when all levels of an organization buy into the IAPD’s recommended practices. We are thrilled with the success our Langley branch has achieved in such a short amount of time, and we are looking forward to expanding our recycling initiatives across all of Redwood’s branches in 2024.”
Following the success of the Langley branch, we are excited to expand our recycling initiatives across all our branches. Currently, our Atlanta, GA USA; Spokane, WA USA; Woodland, WA USA; Prince George, BC Canada and Edmonton, AB Canada branches are making great strides in the early stages of their own recycling initiatives. By following the IAPD’s guidelines, these five branches combined have recycled over 20,000 pounds of performance plastics in December 2023 alone. We are optimistic that all of our branches will be contributing to our recycling initiative in 2024.
Redwood’s rapid transformation shows the benefits of combining a clear plan with full organizational participation. With the help of the IAPD’s guidelines, we created a recycling initiative that was both highly effective and engaging for employees at all levels. We credit our success to both the strong foundation provided by IAPD and the full commitment from our employees; we believe this combination can pay dividends for organizations of all sizes in all industries.