The Recycling Partnership joins forces to expand grant program funding

The Recycling Partnership, Falls Church, Virginia, has announced the recipients of its Steve Thompson Memorial Grant program. The 2018 grant program brings recycling professionals from across the U.S. to St. Louis for the Resource Recycling Conference, Oct. 22-24, helping to further their professional recycling development.

The funding, which exceeds $80,000, is the result of collaboration within the industry to identify and meet the needs of municipal recycling professionals, according to The Recycling Partnership. New York’s Closed Loop Partners and Resource Recycling Inc., Portland, Oregon, also funded this year’s grant program. The nonprofit says additional funders are welcome to further grow the opportunity.

“The term ‘partnership’ is in our name for a reason—we can’t do it alone,” says Keefe Harrison CEO of The Recycling Partnership. “The Steve Thompson Memorial Grant program shows partnership in action: industry corporations coming together to educate state and local change-makers and deliver powerful, effective, tactical tools to boost recycling across the country.”

“Steve Thompson was a committed recycling champion who worked tirelessly to move the industry forward,” The Recycling Partnership says in a news release announcing the grants. Thompson, who died in 2016, was executive director of The Recycling Partnership’s predecessor organization, the Curbside Value Partnership, having retired in 2014. The grants are meant to honor him and his life's work, The Recycling Partnership says.

This is the third year that The Recycling Partnership, in association with Resource Recycling Inc., has offered the Steve Thompson Memorial Grant to bring recycling professionals to the Resource Recycling Conference, paying for travel, lodging and registration. More than 350 recycling professionals from all 50 U.S. states and five countries submitted applications, making it clear that this kind of professional development support is needed in the recycling industry, according to the nonprofit. The Partnership currently issued 60 grants for the 2018 conference, continually growing the program from years past (53 grants were awarded in 2017, and 10 were awarded in 2016).