Dive Brief:

• Hygiene product manufacturer Kimberly-Clark has come on board at The Recycling Partnership, a Falls Church, VA-based collaboration that has set out to improve curbside recycling in the U.S., ultimately boosting the circular economy. In its support of sustainability, Kimberly-Clark uses recycled and recyclable materials to package its products — a few of which are Kleenex, Scott, Huggies, Pull-Ups, and Kotex.
• The Recycling Partnership provides recycling stakeholders with operational and technical support, community outreach methods, and it awards seed grants to communities.
• "Through Kimberly-Clark’s membership, we’re able to expand our reach to even more communities and households, which translates into added convenience for residents and increased tons of recovered material," said Recycling Partnership Director Keefe Harrison. 

Dive Insight:

For a recycling program to take off, the community and its people have to buy into it, and there has to be operational mechanisms in place to run programs smoothly. The Recycling Partnership goes through municipalities to achieve these goals. On the operations end, the organization helps local governments improve their cart-based collections for efficient distributions. As far as the resident buy-in piece, they award grants for community education programs so residents know what to toss in the cart and, as importantly, see the payoff: greener living spaces and a healthier relationship with what they used to think of as trash.

Over the last two years, The Partnership has helped 72 communities to recycle, ultimately reaching 1.2 million U.S. households. The nonprofit promotes recycling with single-stream cart rollouts and other sustainability systems, which are projected to help recover 248,000 tons of recyclables and further impact carbon footprint by conserving 1.3 billion gallons of water and the equivalent of 568,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

The partnership is a good fit for Kimberly-Clark; "Sustainability is inherent to [our] mission and challenges us [to] innovate in ways that extend the life of product and packaging materials, and reduce the pressure on precious natural resources with the development of sustainable alternatives," said Lisa Morden, senior director of Global Sustainability for Kimberly-Clark.