Sustainability 101: Intro to Sustainability

A lot of us have been hearing about, and as a consequence thinking about, sustainability. There’s been a push towards renewable energy in the last several years, including Electric Vehicles (EVs), but also everyday advancements like solar farms and wind turbines.

But when trying to learn about sustainability, especially as it pertains to recycling and renewable materials, the resources online can be convoluted at best and downright confusing at worst.

What’s even recyclable? Is that a recycling symbol on this package or just a representation of the type of plastic used in manufacturing? Why can’t I recycle these plastic components, but I can recycle other types of plastic, and why does it feel like nobody even wants to try?

On account of how much I think about this topic, and my work with two non-profit sustainability boards, let’s get into it. Because doing what’s right for the planet and being more mindful of what we consume shouldn’t take a PhD.

Topics Included in Sustainability

One of the trickier areas of sustainability is how vast a category it is. A lot of people, myself previously included, think mostly about the classic triangle: reduce, reuse, recycle. And that’s a big facet of sustainability, especially ideologically.

However, when it comes to implementation, sustainability includes so much more, from resource management, residental and business use, and environmental factors.

Here are a few examples of areas covered under the umbrella of sustainability.

  • Water use and conservation, ranging from individual to city, county, or statewide policy. Includes drought policy, reservoirs, dams, watering, landscaping, etc.
  • Reuse, including donations, repurposing old materials, thrift stores, etc.
  • Waste management, especially for trash, landfill, recycling, and compost.
    • Recycling processes mainly involving aluminum, plastic, and paper products, and the collection and preparation of said materials.
  • Energy use, specifically in terms of residential, commercial, and government properties, but including sources of energy, grid usage, and storage.
  • Climate change, especially the effects on weather, moisture, heat, and ecosystem.
  • Transportation, notably including public transit, electric vehicles, ride-sharing, personal commutes, and commercial use.
  • Education, which ideally teaches the public how to be more sustainable in their everyday lives, and addresses common questions which, hey, is this post!

So Then, What is Sustainability?

It’s surprisingly hard to tell what’s sustainable and what isn’t. Is it recycling? Water fountains? Using less material in packaging or refusing to offer straws unless specifically asked?

In truth, it’s all of that and more. It starts at manufacturing, spans the entire product journey, and starts over when the end consumer disposes of the product. That means it affects everyone from businesses to individuals, and can be influenced by every affected party along the way.

In a similar cycle, it’s also the way energy is produced and consumed: the energy grid, spanning residential and commercial properties, and where the grid is retrieving energy from. Because of its scale, every small adjustment in favor of savings has potentially massive downstream effects, like installing enough solar panels to effectively cover your personal electrical usage, or ensuring municipal buildings draw from renewable sources instead of coal plants.

And, it’s the responsible use of materials and the reduction of packaging and superfluous content (even though wasteful packaging often looks so pretty on a shelf) to reduce the amount of waste created in the first place. This has the extra benefit of reducing the responsibility on the consumer because each option to choose from is, by default, less wasteful.

That still only scratches the surface. Let’s, instead, cover a few specifics.

Zero Waste

The idea behind zero waste isn’t just about recycling everything. Instead, it focuses on the first two R’s of the recycling poster: reduce and reuse. Zero Waste relies on recycling at the end of the chain, but starts instead with initiatives to reduce the amount of waste created in the first place, and alternative ways to repurpose and reuse old items before they become waste.

Then, when the waste being generated has been minimized as much as possible, we get into collection and diversion.

Diversion rates are the amount of waste diverted divided by how much waste is generated. In this case, diversion includes reuse, recycling, and prevention. This boils down to how much waste is avoided up front rather than collected, thus offsetting the amount of waste overall.

The rest, meaning what’s put in the landfill or sent to recycling facilities, is the remainder of waste. Because even the most efficient recycling facilities can’t recycle everything they receive, we can’t reasonably consider everything sent there as being reused, either. Which is sad.

Zero Waste is the dream outcome for many communities and local governments. It’s the indisputable mark of successful resource management.

The City and County of Broomfield, for example, has a Zero Waste action plan intending to reduce diversion rates by 80% when all policies are enacted, up to 100% in 2035 (which is a hugely ambitious figure).

Waste Emissions

The concept of “waste” goes much further than just trash cans. It includes a variety of concepts, origin points, and downstream effects.

For example, the trash we throw out creates landfills. Then, those same landfills create methane and other greenhouse gases as the materials in them slowly decompose.

Plastic pollution is generated when it’s created at the factory, but also pollutes streams, rivers, oceans, and other ecosystems when discarded irresponsibly, and single-use plastics can be difficult to recycle.

Waste is, by vast majority, created by commercial use, followed by single-family homes.* By comparison, multi-family dwellings produce the least waste. The prominent type of waste is municipal solid waste, followed by recycling, with organics making up a small sliver of local waste.

Because of these factors and more, tracking waste emissions is an important part of local government, and is a great metric to keep in mind when trying to become more sustainable because it’s so tangible. Waste is a physical byproduct. We can keep track of it better, and we can notice the ways in our own lives we’ve succeeded in reducing our footprint by how much less waste we can create.

*These values are relative to the City and County of Broomfield, and are based on local waste emissions tracking since 2020, but are consistent with findings in other regions.

Recycling & Why it Sometimes Feels Broken

Recycling is tricky. To understand why, here’s a simple example from my store.

Our recycling bin keeps getting contaminated by non-recyclable materials. It’s not malicious—customers are genuinely trying to recycle their waste and do a good thing.

But, when this happens, we’re forced to send the whole bag to the dumpster. Why? Because if I send that bag of materials downstream, the recycling facility has to toss it out because it’s contaminated, and they also fine us $200 each time that happens. The first month we tossed the recycling bin contents in the our new recycling bin for collection, we spent nearly $1,200 in fines.

That’s frustrating, and eye-opening so, yeah, I made a sign to hang above our bin, detailing one type of recycling: single stream. It’s the most common kind, and what most recycling bins are designed to collect. Ours included.

There’s a lot of nuance to single-stream recycling, but in brief it includes:

  • Plastic bottles
  • Glass
  • Aluminum (especially cans)
  • Cardboard & paper products

The problem? You have to know that ahead of time, or you inadvertently include a non-recyclable material in the bin, even if it seems like it could be recycled. Did you know a lot of coated cardboard can’t be recycled, for example? Or that your greasy pizza box is garbage because the grease can’t be separated back out from the cardboard?

Even though the items that can be recycled, like paper, seem intuitive, there are so many different types of paper out there that some can’t be recycled, and without knowing that, you risk contamination.

All of that being said, recycling facilities are sophisticated, and sorting materials is what they’re designed to do. We’ve come a long way since recycling began, and I’m hopeful that with the right education and the right tools, we can both prevent recycle contamination and create better sorting systems that protect against accidentally-discarded items.

If you’re looking for something small you can do in your everyday life to help, get yourself used to separating out different recyclable materials from your trash. Focus on aluminum (by far the most recyclable everyday material), paper, and glass.

Who Matters in Sustainability

The example on recycling is a testatement to how everyone, on every side of the equation, matters to make the world more sustainable. The consumer must be careful to know what to throw away, what to recycle, and how to do so properly. The business must make those options available and safeguard them from contamination. The supply chain must take those materials and properly repurpose them.

To expand that to the greater sustainability ecosystem: everyone matters, but that’s disproportionate depending on your footprint. If you’re mindful of what you consume, it’s unlikely you’re going to have a huge impact on sustainability overall. You’re already doing your part, and that’s amazing.

In contrast, if you own a company, participate in shipping on a daily basis, and/or contribute to a lot of waste or energy consumption, then you have a much larger role and responsibility in the whole process.

This comes in many forms, but take the City and County of Broomfield (CCOB), for example. When the city makes decisions, it has a much larger impact. Working to make the municipal buildings produce net zero emissions has a huge impact. Helping residents upgrade their heating and cooling systems to include a heat pump stands to save a great deal of energy. Both of these happen because they’re at scale.

As a retailer, I’m frustrated by understanding that a lot of factors are out of my hands. I can’t control how my distributors pack products when they ship them to me, and often that’s a huge contributor to the waste I create. I can’t control what materials a manufacturer uses to print a game, either, although the GAMA Sustainability Committee is trying, and the EU is working towards a circular economy of reuse.

It can feel overwhelming and difficult to know where to start. I know I’ve felt that way several times as I’ve gotten more involved in tackling sustainability issues.

I do want to take a second to acknowledge the silver lining, though, because while the impacts of recycling are based on widespread adoption, when it goes well and gets public buy-in there’s huge potential to make a difference.

Take this Hank Green video comparing the Blue Origin rocket explosion to the aluminum industry and how much energy is saved with recycled aluminum, for example. Individually, recycling the can my sparkling water came in doesn’t do much. But when all of America is doing it (or closer to 40% based on the data mentioned in the video), it amounts to saving pollution equivalent to 15 rocket explosions per day.

My Sustainability Journey

Two years ago, I knew very little about sustainability. I’d recycle what I could, turned off lights, and avoided over-relying on air conditioning in the summer to save on energy.

Most of what I’ve learned happened since getting involved with the GAMA Sustainability Committee, and learning from the incredible people working within the industry to craete change.

Now, I’m doing my part. Total Escape Games met with a representative of the Colorado Green Business Network (CGBN) to learn how to better track our sustainability journey, set actionable goals, and make improvements.

During that walkthrough, we made plans to:

  • Replace our thermostats with energy-efficient smart thermostats which will help us better control the temperature of the store and reduce energy waste
  • Learn to track our energy usage and waste levels through programs like the EnergyStar Project Manager software and other spreadsheet-like tools
  • Continue to build out our recycling-friendly infrastructure and find a place to send hard-to-recycle materials like Polystyrene (PS) and High-Impact Polystyrene (HIPS)
  • Write a sustainability pledge and go over it with our team
  • Put together a “green team” or give ways for our team to get involved in our sustainability initiatives

I’m thrilled to announce that, since that initial meeting, we’ve been accepted into the CGBN as a bronze member! This is the first tier, and represents the work still to come, but it’s a huge milestone in the store’s, and my, journey.

I’m also working with The Tabletop Game Association’s (GAMA) Sustainability Committee to move the industry towards a more renewable approach to gaming. We’re piloting a study to determine whether displaying games in a “Sustainable & Award-Winning Games” section helps sell those titles better than stocking them alongside the rest of the game library, and creating posters on recyclable game components for stores around the country to hang up.

Finally, I’m sitting on the CCOB Advisory Committee on Environmental Sustainability (ACES). I’ve only attended a couple of meetings so far, meaning I won’t profess to be an expert—mostly I’ve been sitting quietly and learning from people much smarter than I am. But it’s been fascinating to learn how municipal governments think about sustainability, and what’s being done on a local scale.

Take Small Actions to Get Started

Sustainability is a huge topic, and it’s clear to me we all need more education and resources to understand our roles in it and how we can best contribute to renewable practices in our communities and industries.

It would’ve been great if school had taught me about it growing up, but it didn’t. Or if we received mandatory city- or state-wide training as adults, but we don’t.

Instead, we have to educate ourselves, and find the pieces of the bigger picture that feel achievable for us each to do. By taking personal, local action, we end up making a difference even without being able to reach the national or global level. Even without knowing all the different aspects of sustainability we’ll eventually have to grasp.

Feel encouraged in knowing there are steps you can take to be more sustainable! Get involved in your community, or city, or county, or even by paying closer attention to what you throw away and how it might’ve been reused or better disposed of.

Next time you’re at the grocery store, try this: look at the packaging of several different options for something you need to buy, and try to understand which package is the most sustainable. That can be because of material use, a smaller shelf footprint, or other factors we’ve discussed today. I love looking at pasta packaging, especially, because there are so many different ways to store noodles in a container and sell them, and some companies get really creative when trying to be more renewable.

That’s the journey in the end. Small, repeatable steps we can each take to make a big difference when all our efforts are combined. Even when the first step is picking out a pasta brand at your local supermarket.

References

In putting together this post, I did a lot of research both within my industry and community, and also about sustainability in general.

Here’s what I found: