The steady hand of SROs

This article appeared in the October 2025 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

For half a century, state recycling organizations have tied together a diverse industry and worked to steer its future.

In April 2023, Kentucky’s University of Pikeville, state officials and others hosted a recycling symposium that the organizers hoped would lead to regular convenings of industry professionals.

“We don’t have a coalition across the state that brings all of those partners together to talk critically about the issues surrounding recycling,” Katie Williams, then a professional development educator at the school, told news station WYMT at the time. “You can’t just change one thing. It has to be voices across the community that come together to really do any kind of meaningful change.”

The symposium itself was a one-off. But it planted the seed for something more durable and with the same purpose: the Kentucky Recycling Coalition, which earlier this year launched as the state’s first state recycling organization (SRO) and the newest SRO in the country.

Its mission is to boost the state’s subpar recycling rate and strengthen recycling systems, particularly in the rural east and west, by gathering the Kentucky recycling world under one figurative roof to foster professional connections, end market development, and perhaps even policy advocacy — though the latter hasn’t yet been decided by members.

“There are some counties that do a good job of doing that, but it could be spread out throughout the state,” said Derek Carpenter, an inaugural board member who also works as a sustainability and diversion specialist in the Louisville region for Rumpke Waste & Recycling. “The networking aspect is something that is lacking.”

Fellow board member Sheila Fields, solid waste and recycling manager for the city of Covington, was more blunt about the state’s recycling landscape: “It’s fractured.”

In goals and approach, the Kentucky Recycling Coalition falls squarely under a tradition going back half a century, with dozens of SROs throughout the US sitting at the nexus of businesses, nonprofits and local and state governments. Though SRO details and structures vary and have shifted over the years, the fundamental conceit is constant: Improving recycling works better together than alone.

Defining the SRO

There’s no national certification or set definition that bestows the title of SRO, said Marie Kruzan, who retired in May 2023 after more than three decades as executive director at the Association of New Jersey Recyclers. The proper name, paperwork and membership will suffice. But based on interviews with Kruzan and other longtime leaders, SROs are generally nonprofits that welcome public and private members in the field of recycling, put on annual conferences and other events and trainings, and speak with a united voice for the industry within their borders.

California, as it is in so many ways, was the first on the scene, with the California Resource Recovery Association launching on Earth Day 1974, said Executive Director Tracie Onstad Bills.

“In the beginning, it was more of a grassroots organization,” she added. Members would go on hikes or camping in Yosemite. As time went on, the organization became more professional and formal, establishing districts for board members to represent and hiring its first longstanding executive director 15 to 20 years ago.

Several other SROs came about in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following certain attention-grabbing environmental mishaps, such as the Mobro 4000 garbage barge that set sail from New York’s Long Island looking for a disposal option for the trash. “The garbage barge launched a lot of recycling laws in its wake,” said Chaz Miller, who’s been a board member for the Maryland Recycling Network since the mid-1990s. As Al Drinkwater, a similarly long-running board member for the Arkansas Recycling Coalition, put it, “Lots of people got on the recycling bandwagon all of a sudden.”

In New Jersey, one of Kruzan’s primary goals was establishing recycling as a genuinely professional industry, she said. That meant getting the New Jersey association on solid financial footing, bringing in private business members instead of only city and county government, and partnering with Rutgers University on a recycling professional certification. The first cohort graduated in 1992.

“It hurt all of us when somebody was not able to really articulate about recycling,” Kruzan said. “It turned out to be very valuable later, too,” when state employees began taking the course to learn more about the organizations they were regulating.

Erin Jensen, an environmental specialist in New Jersey’s Division of Sustainable Waste Management, said the state and association still frequently partner or complement each other’s efforts. The certification is now required by state law for local governments to receive the state’s annual recycling grants, but it was also valuable for her.

“You definitely get the nitty gritty education for everything the municipalities do,” Jensen said. “It’s great to have that knowledge so you can relate to whatever issues they’re having.”

SROs’ certification courses and other mentorship opportunities also help prepare the next generation, Kruzan and others said.

“We basically train a lot of young people coming into the field,” said Portia Sinnott, executive director of the Northern California Recycling Association, pointing to its renowned annual Recycling Update conference and Recycling 101 course.

When an SRO goes away 

Nowadays at least 44 states have some sort of statewide nonprofit recycling association. And an SRO’s absence is perhaps as illustrative as its presence.

Vermont’s SRO, the Association of Vermont Recyclers, closed its doors around 2012 after the Great Recession led to a sharp curtailment in federal funding. The association relied on US Department of Agriculture grants for school presentations and other education programs that it provided on behalf of several solid waste management districts, said Norm Staunton, its last executive director.

“We knew if that funding dried up, the organization would be in trouble,” he said. “Of course, the inevitable happened.”

Since then, filling the void has roped in multiple organizations. In 2009, the association merged with the SRO in neighboring New Hampshire, now called NH Recycles, which Staunton said mainly meant transferring its educational materials to the other organization, as well as some staff, before shutting its doors.

John Leddy, executive director of the Northwest Vermont Solid Waste Management District and chair of the district managers association, said the Association of Vermont Recyclers “filled an interesting niche.”

“They definitely helped spread the message of recycling at a time when it was just really burgeoning,” he said.

Paul Tomasi, executive director of the Northeast Kingdom Waste Management District, was unsentimental about the association’s closure, however. Waste districts became savvier and more targeted in their school outreach, which outmoded the group’s main offering. “So the need for the Association of Vermont Recyclers kind of faded,” he said.

In a twist of fate, the association for years had advocated for and helped shape Vermont’s universal recycling law and e-scrap recycling program, Staunton said, with the fruits of its labor going into effect around the same time as the group closed.

Today, smaller, more targeted groups like the Solid Waste District Managers Association, provide narrower networking opportunities. State regulators, meanwhile, have been supporting local governments’ outreach and education, said Josh Kelly, solid waste program manager for the Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation. The state earlier this year went even further with an initiative dubbed ReVT. It’s using Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Grant money from the US EPA to forge a wide-ranging coalition of businesses, nonprofits and other interested parties. Meetings for the first crop of members have begun, and networking and a regular conference hopefully will follow within the next year, Kelly said — in other words, all the hallmarks of an SRO.

A reliable presence at the state house

Staunton’s point about SROs laying the groundwork for recycling-related policies is another hallmark of these organizations. On one end is the Arkansas Recycling Coalition, which might be the only SRO that can claim an eventual US president’s influence in its formation. Drinkwater said he was working for the state government during Bill Clinton’s first stint as governor, around 1980, when Clinton asked him to look into the idea of a waste-to-energy facility in Little Rock. The idea didn’t pan out, but it sparked Drinkwater’s interest in recycling. He was on hand a decade later to help start the coalition amid the time’s renewed interest in recycling.

“The two main ideas that I wanted to put into the organization were that we’re an educational organization and we’re a convening organization, we’re not a lobbying organization,” he said. “By not being a lobbying organization, you remove a lot of your opportunity for money coming in from all kinds of sources. But you leave yourself free to be an independent voice and try to bring the very best education to your group.”

At the other end of the spectrum, some recycling organizations are 501(c)6 lobbyists, including the Association of Oregon Recyclers (AOR) and the Northern California Recycling Association. Amy Roth, AOR’s director, said the group has supported improvements to the state’s bottle bill, for example, and has pushed for battery EPR amid the growing problem of battery-sparked fires.

“That was an issue that crossed all members of AOR, needing to see some change,” she said. (Roth is also director of operations for Resource Recycling, Inc.)

Other SROs largely land in the middle, not quite lobbyists but nonetheless vocal on recycling-related policies, especially in support of EPR for packaging in recent years.

“No matter how passionate you are about your vision and your mission, if you’re not necessarily well-known at the state capitol or with your state legislators, it’s super tough to get traction,” said Brandy Moe, who became Recycle Colorado’s executive director in June but has been involved with the organization in other ways for about a decade. The state passed EPR for paper and packaging in 2022, with the association’s wholehearted support.

“Our recycling rate statewide is still hovering around 15%, and I mean, it just doesn’t change,” Moe said, attributing it partly to a dearth of options in rural areas. “I think EPR is going to be one piece of the puzzle, and it’s a big piece.”

Maryland’s association also supported that state’s recently passed EPR, Miller said, with some caveats.

“The MRN was very heavily involved in the debate on EPR, and our goals were very simple: It was to try to get protections in the EPR law for local government programs and local government investments,” he said, noting several MRFs in the state are publicly owned and operated. “These are assets, and they should have the ability to operate on their own and not be subject to the control of a producer responsibility organization (PRO).”

Speaking of PROs, which are charged with carrying out EPR collection and investment programs on behalf of producers, their presence introduces a new dynamic with SROs. Suddenly another entity focused on statewide recycling, with many of the same members, is on the field. But SRO leaders said they see Circular Action Alliance, which has been winning PRO contracts across the country, as a welcome collaborator. CAA didn’t return a request for comment in August.

“It’s really critical for the state organization and the PRO to be united and working together and having a really collaborative communicative relationship,” Onstad Bills said. That doesn’t happen automatically, she added, voicing some frustration over miscommunications over CAA sessions at the recent CRRA conference, for example.

“I don’t think it’s intentional, I think they’re running a hundred miles per hour,” she said. “I want them there. I want them to be a partner.”

Roth agreed, noting the onset of Oregon’s EPR law has bumped up AOR event attendance as well. Beyond that, recyclers involved with the association, with CAA, or both often have been working together in the industry for years and years, anyway.

“I do think that’s a huge plus for all of us involved,” she said. “We’re sort of like a family, and our conference is our family reunion.”

Dan Holtmeyer is a freelance writer living in northwest Arkansas with 15 years of writing and editing experience in newsrooms across the central US.