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As an example of private industry taking the (recycling/green) bull by the horn, Starbucks and Nike are changing the way they do business. From GreenBiz.com:

Starbucks has completed a test showing its ubiquitous coffee cups can be recycled into new cups, and although only one facility can currently make that happen, Starbucks hopes this and other tests push more recyclers to accept trashed cups. Their goal is to provide only recyclable or reusable cups by 2015, and has run various recycling projects to see what its cups can be turned into.

The recent six-week project took about 8,000 pounds of cups collected in Ontario, where Starbucks already recycles cups and other materials, and sent them to Mississippi River Pulp, the company that provides the post-consumer content that's been in Starbucks' cups since 2006. All of the companies' cups, including the new ones made partially with old cups, have 10 percent recycled content.

Mississippi River Pulp is the only company that can provide pulp for products that will come into contact with food or drinks, because its the only one to have gotten the OK from the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA doesn't approve companies and their processes, per se, but it basically says it has no objections. Mississippi River sends the pulp to various paper product companies, including International Paper and others that make Starbucks' cups.

They have a long, long way to go, though:

Only a small fraction of the 4 billion cups Starbucks produces a year end up somewhere other than a landfill. There's recycling in Toronto and Seattle, and composting in San Francisco. The cups go in the trash everywhere else.

Meanwhile, Nike has released to all of its designers their software platform that helps create new products using the least amount of material with the lowest environmental impact:

The intent is for designers to use the tool as early as possible in the design process, so they can see which materials have fewer environmental impacts than others, make changes to designs to reduce waste or choose different finishings.

"We designed this tool specifically to give them feedback right away," said Lorrie Vogel, general manager for Nike's Considered program.

In Nike's internal version of the tool, there are baseline scores built in, so designers see how their work compares to the direction the company wants to go. It also shows which materials would have been better choices, so designers can either switch to them or remember them for future products.

The overall score is mainly based on the life cycle analysis of the materials (provided by consulting firm Brown and Wilmanns Environmental). That's how recycled polyester is one of the best choices in the tool, because of its lower life cycle carbon dioxide emissions, no new toxins, landfill waste reduction and other pluses.

Nike has been at this for some time now, using 13 million recycled plastic bottles to make jerseys for the 2010 World Cup. They have doubled their overall use of recycled polyester in the last year, using 82 million plastic bottles.

Just like Starbucks, though, they have a long, long way to go:

But even though recycled polyester is a high-scoring material, it's not exactly the most sustainable, or possible, material for the entire apparel industry to start moving to, since Nike figured out that if all apparel companies switched one-third of their polyester products to recycled polyester, the demand for that material would exceed how many plastic bottles are made every year.

Interesting news tidbits, indeed, as these large companies come to terms with the impact that their environmental footprint is leaving in our mass consumption society.

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