Recycle BC Blue Star Awards
Recycle BC celebrates its five-year anniversary May 2019 and we recognize we didn’t create a successful EPR recycling program alone. We had great stakeholders and partners supporting us. To celebrate our five-year anniversary, Recycle BC founded the Blue Star Award to share recognition with those who best exemplify Recycle BC’s values of innovation, trust, knowledge, service, and respect, while providing outstanding contribution to Recycle BC’s success.
We aligned each award with one of our values; below is more about our recipients.
Star in Innovation:
Constantly striving to find new solutions and be leading-edge
Monica Kosmak, City of Vancouver
Monica is professional, dedicated and has astute attention to detail. She has been part of the Recycle BC journey from the beginning, leading a direct service transition, planning streetscape recycling, advancing the reduction of single-use plastics, and now exploring packaging and paper in the organics.
Star in Trust:
Being a reliable partner that we placed confidence in and depended on
Doris Wong, Green by Nature
Our collector network collects packaging and paper for recycling. That is the first stage of the process; for materials to be responsibly recycled, we must have viable end-markets for them. Doris successfully markets our materials with growing tonnage year-over-year in an extremely challenging global recycling market.
Star in Knowledge:
Making evidence-based decisions that benefit current and future generations
Tera Grady, Cariboo Regional District
Tera exemplifies the best of our collector network. She manages depot and curbside collection, and for both she works diligently to reduce contamination and improve collection. She is a go-to person sharing learning and knowledge with others.
Star in Service:
Prioritizing program attributes that create ease of use, simplicity of understanding, convenience, and equitable access
Chad Saalfeld, GFL Environmental
Through snowstorms, labour shortages, and the everyday difficult situations with recycling collection, Chad impels, encourages and supports his team to get the job done to while being fair and respected.
Star in Respect:
Regarding community members and our partners by developing mutually-beneficial relationships
Ian Chang, Green by Nature
Ian has really gone above and beyond to make the program run smoothly. He quickly resolves issues and keeps the supply chain network functioning from one end of the province to the other.
Each recipient was awarded a Blue Star award, a table light created by East Van Light, with a wood base made entirely of recycled chopsticks from local sushi restaurants, by Chop Value.