Hello classmates!
I hope that everyone has been having a great experience with their internship thus far. I have been certainly enjoying mine! I am interning with Global Green’s Coalition for Resource Recovery. Global Green is a branch of Green Cross International, which was founded by Mikael Gorbachov to address the 3 greatest challenges facing humanity: weapons of mass destruction, clean water availability, and climate change. Global Green is based in the U.S. with 5 offices scattered across the nation. CoRR is located in NYC and is an industry-working group that is dedicated to stemming climate change and turning wastes into assets. We conduct research and run pilot programs, pushing the bounds of what has been done so far. CoRR is determined on making their pilot programs transferable to around the U.S.
I am involved in 2 of CoRR’s projects. The first project was started in 2008 to remove food service paper packaging from landfills. CoRR has worked extensively with Pret a Manger and Starbucks for the creation of sustainable wholesale food service packaging and diverting them from the municipal solid waste (MSW) stream. The goal of CoRR’s second project is to remove commercial food waste from the MSW stream in New York City. CoRR is researching the possibility of implementing and siting an in-vessel preprocessing system.
In July CoRR recently held a conference titled: “Generating Value from NYCs Commercial Food Waste.” This was an exploratory session to set the groundwork in developing an economical commercial food waste recovery infrastructure for New York City. The infrastructure Global Green develops would serve as a prototype for other urban areas and be applicable nation wide. The conference was extremely well attended with all members of the value chain represented. CoRR is now planning its next series of conferences coming up in November 14th and 15th. There will be four conferences in total, focusing on food waste recovery, wholesale packaging, paper foodservice packaging, and plastic packaging. For more information on these conferences, please click here.
I am utilizing many of the skills that I honed during my first year at Bard. As an intern I am regularly called on for my research and writing skills. I have written several blogs, internal memos, and am working on on-going literature reviews on e-waste and textile recovery. I have also applied many of Professor Sethie’s key lessons from economics in my work as we are continually researching new ways to raise the end value of products to make it worth diverting materials from landfills.
I hope everyone is having a successful summer. Can’t wait to catch up!
-Jaime D