Defining Resource Efficiency

Recently, we made a change to how we discuss one of our industry’s sustainability impact categories. It might seem small, but the change reflects a deeper understanding of one of the categories that describes our sustainability journey – instead of calling it landfill diversion, we are referring to this category as resource efficiency.

To understand the full meaning behind the change, it’s helpful to understand the evolution of the naming convention and how we settled on landfill diversion to begin with. Based on the materiality assessment we conducted in 2017, we determined three impact categories that were most important to guiding the vinyl industry’s sustainability strategy: emissions, health and safety, and waste management.

Before we made the materiality assessment’s results public, we had several conversations about the waste management impact category, and it was quickly decided we’d need to reframe it. My colleagues and I never preferred the term waste management because for one thing, there is a company with this name, and it draws immediate confusion and may imply we have an affiliation. Waste management can also mean the disposing of waste materials, which is also not an accurate description of what we’re trying to achieve. In short, we are trying to keep valuable materials from being disposed of in landfills.  So, we initially settled on landfill diversion, which we’ve used for the last several years.

But as we considered the goals of this impact category more and more, landfill diversion still fell short– because what the industry is really trying to achieve is a positive and proactive way of managing our resources. It is much more than simply keeping waste out of the landfill. We want to keep vinyl materials in use for longer periods of time; recapture it before it goes to landfill; find ways to reuse it; and ultimately save our resources. Once the vinyl molecule is created, we want to keep it as a functioning vinyl molecule. When you consider all these ambitions, the best descriptor is resource efficiency.

Resource efficiency is more encompassing, and it appropriately reflects how we manage vinyl materials at all stages of their life cycle.