Green Team Meeting Recap 5/26

In this month’s Green Team meeting, our general focus was on how our recycling efforts could be improved, as well as how we could make sure we are being as consistent as possible across all our CMA campuses. Judi Anderson kicked us off by briefly discussing how effective the trivia contest was in spreading our awareness and mission of the Green Team to other CMA associates, and had multiple people request to join the Green Team after experiencing our passion and drive for this, which is AWESOME!

We dove into how all our Honda dealers are signed up for the “Green Dealer” program through the OE manufacturers. Other notable OEMs with a green initiative are Subaru and Volvo. Our goal is to have every OE dealer adopt a green initiative and really push to make this of daily importance.

Liza joined us to welcome Michael Kruse, our guest speaker from Evergreen Recycling, and introduced him as our consultant to oversee our recycling efforts at our Charlottesville campus. Mike Kruse had over 25 interviews with CMA associates discussing our recycling efforts and will share his notes and what he found was being done well, and what could improve. Michael began by stating how he looked at the flow of materials being recycled at the Charlottesville dealerships. Where does it go? Who takes it? Is the cleaning crew on board? How well is the system working? Some of the recycled items that were reviewed were paper, cardboard, aluminum, plastic bottles, plastic film, ink toner cartridges, scrap metal, wood, tires, car batteries, fluids and compostables. Michael’s opening statement was “The big takeaway was CMA has materials that you no longer want, and you want to do the right thing and not send them to the landfill.” “There is a lot that CMA is doing right,” said Michael. He pointed out that the biggest concern was that the dumpster services were not meeting the demand that was needed at these stores and explained how he consulted on how to make this process better.

We continued to discuss ways that we could help facilitate the recyclable materials to the right places, and making sure we were getting our message across of “why” we were recycling. Some of these solutions included doing educational videos showing “A Day in the Life of Recyclables” as coined by Judi. Wouldn’t it be nice to actually know where your efforts are going? Another option was to take a tour of the recycling facilities, and see how they receive it, where it’s sorted, and what it goes on to become after it’s been recycled. But before we could do any of that, we must make sure that our recycling bins are easy to use and understand. Are they labeled well? Are they visible? Do they all look the same across all CMA locations? These are all questions Michael Kruse was searching for the answers to. Michael also went on to explain that “The more you do to recycle, the harder it is to make progress.” That lead us into the topic of “Sort” recycling, which is sorting individual materials vs. “Single Stream” recycling, one bin for all materials that is sorted by the vendors at the facilities. Michael included that sort recycling has a higher recovery rate, but less volume. Single stream recycling has a lower recovery rate, but at a much higher volume.

All in all, Michael thought we had the right pieces in place, but had some room for improvement. Some of Michaels last words were, “Just because some pieces aren’t great, doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch.” Which means we are headed in the right direction and have a lot to be proud of.

Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this growth with the Green Team thus far!