Your business pays for its trash three times: once to buy it, once to store it, and once to bury it. Most of what's in your dumpster was never trash at all - it's cardboard with a buyer, food with a tax deduction attached, metal a scrap yard will pay cash for, and grease people now steal at night because it's worth that much. The only thing missing is a system.
How Any Business Can Recycle is that system, written by a recycling industry insider who tells you the truth the brochures won't: what actually gets recycled, what doesn't no matter what the label says, and where the money really is. No moralizing. No greenwashing. Just arithmetic, phone numbers, and a plan.
Inside, you'll learn how to: read your hauler invoice and find the fees hiding in it; run a one-day waste audit that shows you exactly what you're burying; map every material in your building to a real destination; design bins and signs that work on distracted humans; negotiate your hauler contract with data instead of hope; measure honestly, so your numbers survive scrutiny; make green claims a lawyer would sign off on; and handle every major material, from cardboard (the king) to plastics (the honest chapter nobody else will write) to food, metals, and the closet where the batteries live.
The book ends with playbooks for restaurants, offices, retail, warehouses, and events - plus the 90-Day Plan: a dated, checkbox-level calendar that takes any business from an unread invoice to a measured, profitable, defensible recycling program in one quarter. A full appendix of reproducible worksheets is included.
A. Nathan Mihelich is the Executive Director of the Illinois Recycling Foundation and Communications & Development Director of the National Recycling Coalition. He has spent his career on the loading docks this book was written for.
