Earth911 Podcast: Building A Better Recycling Infrastructure With ISRI’s Robin Wiener

Robin Wiener, president of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), joins the conversation to explore the evolution of the circular economy and how the role of recycling will evolve. Today’s recycling infrastructure is closely aligned with the waste management system. There are growing signs that the reuse of products is essential and that recycling services can be built into the product lifecycle as the last step when no more reuse is possible. But the challenge recyclers face, along with the rest of us, is the limited range of choices in recyclable materials used in products and packaging. Consumer goods and packaging companies must simplify their designs, abandoning hard-to-recycle materials that cannot be processed by the equipment currently available in local recycling facilities.