California Stewardship Arrow Award Winners

2010 California Stewardship Arrow Awards Selection Panel

(L to R) Pat Fong Kushida, Sacramento Asian Chamber of Commerce Executive Director; Heidi; John Allard, Roseville City Councilmember; Mike Sangiacomo, CEO Recology; Scott Tyrell, Legislative Assistant to San Joaquin Supervisor Leroy Ornellas. Not pictured: Kevin Hendrick, Del Norte Solid Waste Management Authority Executive Director.

See Selection Panelist Bios

Golden Arrow Award: For Overall Excellence in Product Stewardship

The Greater Stockton Chamber of Commerce is the recipient of the 2010 Golden Arrow Award for the Green Team San Joaquin project. Green Team San Joaquin is an outstanding example of business leaders playing a defining role in fostering development of green business in their community and helping them to save money to improve profitability. This collaborative effort brings together private businesses, City and County government representatives, economic development professionals, educators, students and community members to develop and implement product stewardship and green business practices which reduce waste and create jobs. Program highlights include:

• Recycling Energy Air Conservation (REACON) Team: 
  REACON provides outreach to 150 businesses each year looking to “green” their practices and provides connections between businesses to reduce waste and divert materials for reuse and recycling.  The team develops reports documenting results including waste reduction and increased recycling;
• Recycling Exposition (REXPO):
  Annual event that had over 1,000 attendees last year and showcases businesses and services that promote sustainable practices and product stewardship;
• Buy Local, Buy Green Campaign:  
  Promotes local procurement of green products and services; 
• Green.edu:  
  A program to prepare students for green-collar jobs
• Education and Collaboration Venues: 
  Through four Quarterly Workshops and 12 Monthly meetings each year averaging 60 participants and additional special meetings, they are constantly networking the parties to increase awareness and education on how to save money by reducing waste:
• Green Business Recruitment Through Recycling Market Development Zone (RMDZ):
  The Greater Stockton RMDZ is the only Zone in the state where the local Chamber serves at the Zone Administrator responsible for recruiting new businesses to the area which reduce and recycle but this Chamber goes beyond that to help all local businesses do the same. They estimate they have created 41 jobs to date while reducing waste and business costs. Examples include siting a new wine bottle washing and reuse plant and siting a new PET flaking facility that opens in Tracy in September.

Pictured left to right: Senator Lois Wolk; Blaine Bibb, San Joaquin Green Team Lead; Chamber President Rick Goucher; Frank Ferral, Stockton Chamber/Recycling Market Development Zone Lead; San Joaquin County Supervisor Leroy Ornellas; Doug Wilhoit, Stockton Chamber CEO

All these programs have resulted in the County of San Joaquin achieving 71% diversion rate, creating  41 jobs, and helping local businesses thrive by reducing their waste costs.

The Chamber’s immersion in the green business stewardship role demonstrates real  leadership in the movement to create green jobs and prepare a green work force through local schools and industries.

Green Arrow Award

ChicoBag Company, located in Butte County’s City of Chico, was selected as the winner of the 2010 Green Arrow Award for System and Design Innovations. ChicoBag produces reusable shopping bags made from recycled polyethylene terephtalate (PET) plastic – the primary source of PET is plastic beverage containers. The company’s mission is not only to produce a top quality reusable bag made of recycled products, but they also take-back old bags, even their competitors, to recycle them into new products like rugs and coasters. 

Pictured left to right: Andy Keller, President of ChicoBag and Award Panelist Mike Sangiocomo, President & CEO of Recology

ChicoBag also advocates for the elimination of single use bags, which they do directly by advocating for legislation that would eliminate plastic bags and by supporting grassroots campaigns throughout the nation. ChicoBag developed the Bag Monster campaign, a costume worn by volunteers that features 500 plastic bags – the amount of plastic bags the average American uses in a year. Additionally, ChicoBag realized that shoppers often forget their bags so they designed their bags with an integrated “stuff pouch” so the full size bag can become compact enough to fit into a backpack or purse. For more information, visit chicobag.com.

Bow & Arrow Award

As You Sow Foundation, a San Francisco based non-profit, was awarded the 2010 Bow & Arrow Award for Coalition Building. As You Sow’s mission is to promote a safe, just and sustainable world by moving corporations towards environmental and social responsibility through dialog, shareholder advocacy, grantmaking and innovative legal strategies. As You Sow strategically used shareholder influence to obtain commitments from three of the largest beverage companies in the United States – Coca Cola Company, PepsiCo and Nestle Waters North America - to recycle a majority of their post-consumer containers over the next six years. The companies’ shareholders pressed their companies to commit to greatly increased rates of recycling for bottles and cans, using higher levels of recycled content in new bottles, reducing the use of toxics, reducing energy usage and creating small carbon footprints. As You Sow’s accomplishments via shareholders is reversing decades of corporate practices that have socialized the costs of end of life management.  

Pictured left to right: City of Roseville Councilman and Award Panelist John Allard;  Conrad McKerron, Senior Program Director, As You Sow, Andy Behar CEO As You Sow; Rob D’Arcy, CPSC Board Chair

As You Sow pioneered a beverage container survey and report card to measure company performance on recycling and the use of recycled content. Nestle Waters took action after receiving a failing grade on the highly publicized report card, calling it a “wake up call.” As You Sow’s approach of leveraging shareholder influence for environmental gain is unique, yet it should serve as a model for other institutional shareholders that could adopt similar shareholder engagement practices to foster product stewardship. As You Sow is also building coalitions with large and small beverage producers and prominent grocery chains including Wal-Mart, Safeway, Kroger and Whole Foods in an effort to move the United States toward sustainable consumption, production and zero waste in beverage packaging. For more information, visit asyousow.org.

Honorable Mentions

Green Arrow

• Bentley Prince Street, Inc., based in Los Angeles, is the largest commercial carpet manufacturer in California, producing more than six million yards of carpet each year. The company is committed to sustainable commerce and has developed a Mission Zero ™ goal of eliminating any negative impact its processes may have on the environment by the year 2020. Every product Bentley Prince Street manufactures and markets contains recycled content, which helps create market pull for recycled carpet products. Bentley Prince Street also offers an end of life reclamation program, ReEntry®2.0, the industry’s first closed-loop recycling system for Type 6,6 nylon fiber. For more information, visit bentleyprincestreet.com.
  
  
• Cepheid, located in Sunnyvale, manufactures diagnostic and analytical equipment for the healthcare and environmental protection industries and for homeland security. Cepheid teamed with packaging suppliers and packaging equipment manufacturers to redesign their packaging for waste minimization and enhanced manufacturability. Through green design, the company is achieving significant packaging waste reduction by exchanging wood crating for cardboard, eliminating non-recyclable foil shipping pouches, eliminating packaging polystyrene, and reducing the amount of corrugated cardboard and paperboard used. Overall, the company will have reduced or eliminated more than 140,000 pounds of packaging material by 2011. The Cepheid model now serves as an excellent model for similar medical diagnostics companies to realize packaging waste minimization. For more information, visit cepheid.com.
  
  
• Peninsula Packaging, located in Exeter, California, quickly established itself as a leader in sustainable packaging after the company was founded in 2002. Peninsula Packaging (PPC) manufactures plastic food packaging such as apple and strawberry “clamshell” packages.  The company’s first manufacturing facility was built around a plan to make all products from recycled drink bottles. PPC utilizes more recycled drink bottles than any packaging company in the U.S. and has processed more than 100 million pounds of post-consumer recycled soft drink bottles in the past three years. PPC also has a goal of making itself energy self-sufficient. To that end, PPC owns and operates the largest private-investor solar installation in California. PPC’s designs are reducing the amount of raw materials necessary to produce the packaging but at the same time providing sufficient protection for perishable fruits in order to reduce the amount of food wasted during transportation. Through one warehouse chain alone, PPC’s packaging has been used to ship nearly one billion apples and the rate of bruised apples has been reduced to zero. For more information, visit penpack.net.
  
  
• Rent-a-Green Box, located in Costa Mesa, California defines the concept of “thinking outside the box.” The company is the first comprehensive zero-waste packaging and moving alternative in America. The company has created 20 unique, cradle-to-cradle, sustainable packing and moving products for residential and commercial moving. Their cornerstone product is called the Recopack, made from 100% recycled post-consumer plastic trash mined from landfills and recycling facilities. Recopacks take the place of cardboard boxes most often associated with moving. Recopacks are rented to customers and delivered directly to the client’s door in trucks powered by vegetable oil and bio-fuels. Each Recopack is designed to last 400 round trip uses and then can be ground up to make another Recopack, in an entirely closed loop system. For more information on, visit rentagreenbox.com.
  
  
• Surtec, Inc, located in Tracy, California, is a leader in developing and manufacturing green cleaning chemicals and equipment. Products are manufactured in a state of the art waste minimization facility in Tracy, using raw materials purchased locally whenever possible. Many of Surtec’s patented products are designed to improve indoor air quality, a particular challenge faced by the building maintenance industry. Surtec markets 100% recycled floor maintenance pads and floor mats made from recycled plastic water bottles. In addition to manufacturing green cleaning products, Surtec also refurbishes used janitorial equipment that would otherwise be landfilled and provides hands on training in “Green Cleaning” and LEED-certified maintenance procedures.  For more information, visit surtecsystem.com.

Bow & Arrow

• The City of Indian Wells partners with Hidden Harvest, a local produce reclamation organization, to encourage citrus producers to donate unwanted fruit to local food banks, shelters and other organizations that feed the hungry. The Coachella Valley is one of the largest agricultural regions in the nation, producing millions of pounds of citrus fruit each year. Unfortunately, large quantities of fruit do not make it to market each year. There are two main reasons for this: market demand drops, reducing prices to the point where harvesting and shipping is not economically feasible; and blemished fruit is usually not considered “acceptable” by markets. This fruit used to go to waste until the City developed this program with a unique twist on product stewardship. Although fruit is not a “manufactured” product, surplus material must still be handled in an environmentally-sound manner and this alternative to landfilling is a unique example of a closed-loop system. The City provides a collection station where residents can drop off their citrus fruit, which is then sorted, packed and delivered to local organizations. The program has collected and re-distributed more than 240,000 lbs of fruit since 2007. For more information, go to cityofindianwells.com.

Infinity

• US Air Conditioning, headquartered in the City of Industry, California is the world’s largest privately owned HVAC distributor. The company voluntarily developed an innovative “cash for clunkers” product stewardship program for mercury thermostats. Although California passed a mercury thermostat recycling law that went into effect in July of 2009, US Air Conditioning has created an added incentive for contractors and do-it-yourselfers to recycle old mercury thermostats by offering a discount on the purchase of a new thermostat. US Air Conditioning has worked collaboratively with the Thermostat Recycling Corporation (TRC), a product stewardship organization, to recycle the thermostats that have been collected, ensuring safe handling of the elemental mercury contained in these devices. The company has also developed a proactive outreach program to educate and train their staff, contractors and DIYers about the dangers of improperly disposed mercury and the importance of recycling. Because of these efforts, US Air Conditioning has recycled more than 12.5 pounds of mercury – nearly twenty-five percent of all mercury recycled in California since the new law went into effect. That might not sound like much, a single gram of mercury can contaminate a twenty acre lake. For more information, go to us-ac.com.

 

This awards program was funded by a grant from the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle).