To help answer these questions, a survey questionnaire was developed for selected industry groups which are heavy producers of scrap and waste materials. These industries include chemicals (26.6 percent of the responding firms), food (12.3 per- cent), printing (9.8 percent), paper (9.2 percent), oil/gas extraction (6.7 percent), textiles (3.9 percent), furniture (3.9 percent), petroleum refineries (2.9 per- cent), lumber (2.5 percent), apparel (1.9 percent), and others (20 percent). From this sample, a total of 527 responses were received, a response rate of 17.6 per- cent.
Most of the respondents (84.4 percent) indicated that they have participated in some form of green purchasing initiative. As shown in Table I, the most important influences on supplier selection are potential liability, followed by cost associated with the disposal of hazardous material, and compliance with state and federal environmental regulations. The importance of the factors may stem from fear of liability litigation and fines and subsequent negative publicity.
Purchasing can enhance the effectiveness of a source reduction strategy in a number of ways such as:
- Reducing the purchased volume of items that are difficult to dispose of or are harmful to the ecosystem
- Reducing the use of hazardous virgin materials by purchasing a higher percentage of recycled or reused content
- Requiring that suppliers minimize unnecessary packaging and use more biodegradable or returnable packaging
In this study, respondents were asked to indicate the frequency of use of three strategies which could be used to reduce the sources of upstream waste. These results are shown in Table IIA.
Survey results indicate that 73.8 percent of the respondents either frequently or somewhat frequently use recycling for source reduction. This may be due in part to the more than 400 solid waste and recycling laws enacted by state governments in the United States.
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