During almost three decades of recycling in the Puget Sound region, Waste Management has seen big changes in the industry. As the largest residential recycler in North America and in the Puget Sound, our business is constantly changing to meet the shifting consumer habits and evolving markets.

Have you noticed a shift in your blue cart contents? We sure have – less newspaper, more cardboard. Newspapers used to be the “bread and butter” of our recycling programs. Today we generate 50 percent less newspaper in the U.S. than we did a decade ago. The arrival of online stores like Amazon and Zappos has increased cardboard in our recycling carts. The changes we have seen in our industry in the last five and 10 years are dramatic.

We are also seeing different types of containers in our carts, too. Rigid packaging (bottles, cans, tins, glass, and plastic containers) is giving way to flexible packaging, mainly stand-up pouches, due to their lightweight and strong properties. These new plastic technologies use fewer natural resources and create less greenhouse-gas emissions than the traditional packaging.

Have you noticed something different about plastic water bottles? They are lighter than ever before. Cellophane-thin walls, easy to squish and crinkle, and the caps now come off so easily. Companies have found they can save money by using less virgin resources, which also has a positive environmental impact and costs less to transport. That is good news. Yet it also has implications for recycling processing. It takes a lot more of these flimsy lighter plastic water bottles to create a viable amount of processed recyclables. Today, it takes around 97,000 plastic water bottles to create one ton of recyclable material. In 2005, it took approximately 62,000 bottles to create one ton of recyclable material.

The materials we process contain less valuable material than in years past so we need more of them to create the same tonnage. Because of this perfect storm – needing more “materials” to process and lower commodity values for those materials – we all need to do our part to prevent waste and reduce consumption. Then we can recycle the rest.

Reducing consumption and waste production is the first and most effective step toward reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Let’s make choices that make environmental sense. Preventing waste is the most important environmental commitment we can make for growing healthy communities.

Kirkland is a perfect place to embrace reducing waste first and focus on recycling the right materials — all with the end goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Michelle Metzler is with Waste Management.