Senior Director, Environmental Affairs and Corporate Sustainability
Prioritizing Recycling
When a material or product can no longer be used, it often becomes waste. The U.S. Postal Service’s commitment to fostering a circular economy is focused on moving that material from a waste bin to a recycling bin. Our goal of diverting 75 percent of our waste from landfills by 2030 prioritizes natural resource preservation while turning waste into reusable raw materials or products.
The recycling focus of our dedicated employees, who are compacting and baling cardboard and moving shrink wrap to recycling, has been measurable. Materials historically treated as trash — that we paid to have hauled away — are now collected, compacted and packaged for resale through the coordinated efforts of our maintenance, operations, sustainability and supply teams. We continue to update our training programs, install new recycling equipment and design processes to streamline our work efforts and optimize our recycling results.
We aim for a circular economy within USPS — one that keeps materials and products in circulation for as long as possible by reducing material use, redesigning materials and products to be less resource intensive, and recapturing “waste” as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.
The Postal Service’s work towards ensuring a circular economy doesn’t stop with cardboard and shrink wrap. Wooden pallets are a great example of how the principles of a circular economy have helped us evolve our recycling approach. Our suppliers use a lot of wooden pallets to offload large, heavy deliveries at postal facilities across the country. In the past, they’d be stacked up behind a facility, getting in the way until we paid to have them removed or destroyed. Today, we don’t see these pallets as waste. Instead, we work with our supply management and asset management teams to repurpose or resell them.
The benefits of this approach go beyond environmental stewardship. By recycling materials like wooden pallets, cardboard and shrink wrap instead of paying for them to be moved to a landfill, we are turning the cost of removal into a meaningful contribution to our organization-wide goals.
Recycling is not new to the Postal Service; we started comprehensive recycling operations some three decades ago. However, the 2023 launch of the Postal Service Environmental Council has brought greater structure, accountability and collaboration to recycling at the scale demanded by one of the nation’s largest institutions. Now headed by Postmaster General David Steiner, who was once chief executive officer of the country’s largest waste management company, this council’s guiding tenets are bringing real change to reducing our environmental footprint.
I am proud of the Postal Service’s commitment to a circular economy and the dedication demonstrated by the work efforts of our employees. Our environmental focus is good for business and it’s good for the communities that we serve.
Jennifer Beiro-Réveillé
Senior Director, Environmental Affairs and Corporate Sustainability