Event is May 12-13, 2015, in College Park, Maryland.
The National Recycling Coalition (NRC) has announced that Mathy Stanislaus, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant administrator, will keynote the organization’s first Sustainable Materials Management (SMM) Summit, which will be held May 12-13, 2015, at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.
Stanislaus heads EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, which is responsible for the agency’s land cleanup, solid waste and emergency response programs. As EPA’s primary person in charge of SMM nationally and internationally, he will anchor the event by defining SMM and providing a foundation for the national policy discussions of the Summit.
Stanislaus will join Judith Enck, EPA’s Region 2 administrator, as well as a diverse set of stakeholders representing various facets of the sustainable materials management sector.
The goal of the two-day event is to elevate the issues around discards management back to the forefront of national policy.
“We are pleased to have EPA’s leadership open and jumpstart the SMM Summit dialog,” says Gary Liss, SMM Summit co-chair. “The future of SMM is critical for the thousands of NRC members and others across the country working each and every day to manage discards through waste reduction, reuse recycling, composting, product stewardship and other diversion methods.”
In addition to the EPA, the Summit will highlight efforts of a number of companies, programs and SMM efforts across the country, including Toyota, the US Composting Council, the Cities of New York and Austin and the Institute for Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI).
“The Summit is the launch pad for what NRC and the 200 organizations and businesses participating in the event see as the first of an on-going effort,” says Julie Rhodes, SMM Summit co-chair. “The recommendations that come out of this first Summit and compiled and prioritized in the National SMM Action Plan become the roadmap for NRC’s advocacy and work for the coming years.”