The Planning and Development Department’s responsible stewardship of resources and efforts to reduce waste align with the City of Eugene’s organizational values. Participating in a zero waste certification process has been an opportunity to achieve waste reduction goals while implementing processes that drive increased diversion of materials from the landfill.
In addition to reaching our goal of an independently verified diversion rate of over 90%, this process has helped us continue refining sustainable purchasing guidelines and informed best practices around recovering resources and realizing savings through reuse and recycling.
Certification driven analysis of generated materials has allowed us to more accurately quantify savings associated with the diversion of reusable items, driving future improvements in how we reduce this component of our waste stream. Ongoing monitoring has helped realize continued value associated with paperless processes and driven innovative solutions for handling hard-to recycle materials such as Styrofoam which benefits facilities across the larger organization.
Throughout the certification process we’ve been able to invest in relationships with community partners and service providers; building capacity for local nonprofits through contractual work and donated materials, coupled with collaborative refinement of key reporting processes. These capacity building efforts and strengthened relationships provide benefits across the entire community by helping build a stronger network of sustainable service providers and nonprofit organizations across Eugene.
"The City of Eugene’s Planning and Development Department has successfully achieved a departmental waste reduction goal of 90% diversion of materials from landfill through the implementation of robust internal recycling, reuse and composting programs. These efforts align with our organization’s triple-bottom-line decision making process and our efforts were supported by the City’s sustainable purchasing practices and by resource recovery opportunities that are available in our community. In addition to demonstrating a verifiable diversion rate, achieving certification has driven continued improvement and innovation on ongoing waste reduction efforts," said Deveron Musgrave, Waste Prevention Program Analyst at the City of Eugene.