- 13 reads
A - The Leadership
David Biddle, Executive Director of the Greater Philadelphia Commercial Recycling Council
David Biddle has been a solid waste management and recycling planner for over 25 years. Since 1984, he has worked with large corporations, real estate investment firms, shopping malls, government, business associations, healthcare systems, universities, and school districts to plan, design, and implement cost effective, sustainable recycling, composting, and waste minimization programs. In the late 1980s he was senior planner in the Philadelphia Recycling Office and helped create both the city’s residential and commercial recycling programs. For his work on Philadelphia’s commercial recycling program he received the Pennsylvania Governor’s Environmental Excellence award in 1996. Mr. Biddle helped found the Greater Philadelphia Commercial Recycling Council in 1995, and has served as its Executive Director since 2000. Over the years, Mr. Biddle has performed over 800 commercial and institutional waste and recycling audits throughout the United States.
Mr. Biddle has authored numerous papers and manuals on environmental and economic topics for both business and consumers, and has published articles in national magazines and trade journals, including: The Harvard Business Review, BioCycle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Recycling Today, Resource Recycling, BuzzWorm Journal, MSW Management, and Philadelphia Business Journal. He also served as a contributing editor to In Business magazine for more than a decade. Mr. Biddle has a BA in anthropology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and an MS from the University of Pennsylvania in energy management and policy.
B - The Organization
Website Address: GPCRC.com
GPCRC Blog: GPCRC.blogspot.com
Mission Statement
To help member organizations achieve 80% or better recycling programs that save them money and reduce their environmental impact dramatically.
About Us
The Greater Philadelphia Commercial Recycling Council has been helping businesses and institutions in the Delaware Valley put together positive environmental programs since 1995. Recycling is the first step towards full-scale sustainability and business greening. GPCRC provides planning support, economic analysis, market advice, employee education, public promotion, and media relations. Most importantly, the GPCRC guides our members in tracking and evaluating programs and reporting regularly to executives, employees and customers on program successes.
Our most exciting development in 2008 is a partnership with the highly innovative cooperative recycling group, The Recycling Network, or IRN. Recycling at work means more than just office paper, cardboard and beverage containers. IRN provides customer-oriented, highly flexible recycling services for up to 80 different materials – and they can pick everything up at once using their One Stop recycling system. What this means is that businesses and institutions in the Delaware Valley can scale their recycling and waste reduction plans up the ladder with goals of 80% or better waste diversion. Zero-Waste is now a possibility!
The GPCRC coordinates tours of innovative recycling facilities, schedules several workshops a year on leading edge recycling issues, and hosts talks by local and national leaders in the field of waste management. The 2009 schedule should be out sometime by the end of January.
C - GREEN 10-Qs
1. What childhood, personal, or career eco-experience inspired your current work?
I have always been fascinated with the question of waste. How is it that something of value can all of a sudden be banished into the land of “Throw it away?”
2. Who inspires you in our Philadelphia community?
Our members! Check them out online at our web site. They are a diverse, committed, civic-minded group if ever there was one.
3. What professional accomplishment are you most proud of?
Helping the Philadelphia International Airport grow its recycling program.
4. What is one of your favorite Philly eco-activities, products, or services?
I love the art produced by the Philadelphia Dumpster Divers – I love the Dumpster Divers’ atteetude, too…
5. What is one of the things that you regularly do to make your life more eco-friendly?
Working from my home office means I don’t commute to work. When I do have to commute, I try to take the train.
6. What would you change about your home or office to make it more eco-friendly?
Add photo-voltaic electricity, on-demand hot water, and do a better job reducing convective heat loss through walls, doors and windows.
7. What would you change about Philly to make it more eco-friendly?
Charge double or more for parking everywhere, invest heavily in SEPTA, make buses free in Center City, and establish Philly Bike Share.
8. What book, movie, or TV show would you recommend people to read or watch?
Movies and TV shows are rather eco-intensive. I recommend reading good books as the least harmful form of entertainment. Small is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher is something I go back to again and again. You can’t call yourself an environmentalist unless you’ve read this wonderful book of inspiring, insightful essays. And the utopian novel Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright is by far the most inspiring vision of sustainability I know of.
9. In addition to your family and friends, what three people living or dead would you take to live with you for a decade on a deserted island?
There are too many creative, intelligent people I miss who are dead – David Foster Wallace, Jeff Buckley, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, E.F. Schumacher, Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, Mary Douglas. It breaks my heart to think of them living on the earth again. So I have to say: Gary Snyder (nature’s greatest living poet); George McRobie (co-founder with E.F. Schumacher of the Intermediate Technology Development Group and author of Small is Possible); and Stewart Brand (pioneer futurist, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly). A decade of planning for the next Sustainability Revolution.
10. What quote or your own words of wisdom would you like to share with our readers?
“I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.” - E.F. Schumacher
For more information on the Greater Philadelphia Commercial Recycling Council, visit their website, or you can email Mr. Biddle personally at DBiddle@gpcrc.com.
While recycling is a vital component of a sustainable strategy for the home and office, it is just the tip of the iceberg. GREENandSAVE.com offers myriad ways to make your life more ‘Green’, all while saving money on your utility bills. For more information, take a look at their information on green Home Remodeling.
