I work as a Recycling Information and Data Manager at Can I Recycle This? Inc., and my Sustainability Capstone was the start of that journey! I knew that I would round off my Graduate Certificate in Sustainability with a Capstone Project, and late in the spring semester of 2021 I began to think about what I might do. At the time my husband was working for Deeds Creative, an Athens, GA local business specializing in web marketing and technology solutions. Deeds had just taken on a new client, Can I Recycle This? that had the whole team excited.
Can I Recycle This?, or CIRT for short, is a startup working in the circularity space. Through a web platform they help consumers and producers do a better job of recycling materials. This is an extremely important sustainability mission because increasing the recapture of materials at end-of-life reduces the need to produce virgin materials- a process that requires significantly more energetic inputs which contribute to atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gasses.
Through my connection with Deeds Creative I was introduced to the CEO of CIRT, Kat Shayne, an associate professor at the University of Georgia College of Engineering. Her passion for environmental stewardship and innovation was immediately inspiring, and by the end of the meeting I knew that I wanted to partner with CIRT for my Sustainability Capstone. Kat’s business was still young at the time, and she knew that she wanted it to be a force for good in the world. So, with help from Dr. Tyra Byers, Program Coordinator for the UGA Office of Sustainability, I connected with an existing capstone project to get CIRT B-Corp Certified.
Before this project I had never heard of a Certified B Corp, but through my capstone experience I learned that these are companies aligning with the triple bottom line: of people, planet, and profit. B Corp Certification is a process that businesses can undertake where they restructure their practices and policies to better respect their workers, decrease their negative environmental impact, promote equality and growth in local economies, and engender better trust and transparency in corporate America. As The B Corp Handbook proclaims on the front cover, this is a guide for “How You Can Use Business as a Force for Good.” This was an exciting opportunity for me to work with CIRT to create a sustainable business from the ground up- starting small with only five employees- so that they could grow in a way that benefited the world.
As an environmental economics major this was the perfect experience for me, because it gave me a real-world example of economic incentives working in concert with environmental and social improvements. This was my first real-world exposure to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) which I had covered as a theory in classes like Advanced Environmental Economics and Policy Analysis. CSR are community and environmental goodwill activities in which corporations engage, which some empirical evidence shows lead to superior financial performance in the long run (Portney 2008). Working with CIRT to achieve Certified B Corp status allowed me to get first-hand experience with the ways that companies can tangibly improve the impact of their business. I helped CIRT re-write the employee handbook and overhauled hiring practices to be more equitable and respectful of workers. I also completed an analysis of CIRT’s digital supply chain, and helped them to shift towards greener web infrastructure. Finally, I completed a survey of CIRT’s operational carbon emissions and set them up with renewable energy sources and carbon offsetting credits so that they could be a net-zero business.
As I continued to work with CIRT towards their B Corp Certification I kept running across interesting applications of my sustainability education to their business model. With these ideas in hand I approached Kat and the CIRT Corner was born. On this blog I had the opportunity to explore the seven pillars of sustainability (systems thinking, strategic competency, integrative problem solving, intrapersonal competency, anticipatory competency, normative competency, and collaborative competency), applying these concepts to my experiences working with CIRT. The blog gave me an outlet to explore applications of my academic knowledge to the “real” business world, something that I found extremely valuable. Even now, post-graduation, I continue to use CIRT Corner as an outlet for my thoughts on emerging research topics in environmental management and justice.
