Erik Makinson will literally dive through your dumpster to help you find out just how much money you’re wasting. That’s how he helped Whitworth University’s food service provider, Sodexo, figure out they were throwing out $15,000 a year in soup alone. With data analysis and trash weigh-ins, they also learned things like a single serving of scrambled eggs, while beautiful on the plate, contained five eggs.
“Nobody needs to eat five eggs for breakfast, but you don’t realize until you dive that deep into the data, into the waste stream,” says Makinson, who founded Resource Synergy to help clients like Whitworth become more sustainable while saving money.
With Makinson’s help this year, the university reduced its waste by 70 percent in just months, diverting much of the 1,000 pounds of campus food waste per day to compost, reducing trash pickups from weekly to every other month as needed, saving thousands in trash hauling and billing mistakes, and netting the university the higher education Recycler of the Year award from the Washington State Recycling Association last month.
And that’s just one of the 80 or so clients and hundreds of businesses Makinson has worked with since starting Resource Synergy in 2015.
At the time, he was a consultant with Engie (then Encova), a Spokane-based business that helps major companies, usually with 100 or more locations, find ways to reduce energy use and be more environmentally friendly. On his way to work, Makinson would regularly drive past downtown Spokane buildings and notice they only had dumpsters out back, with no recycling in sight.
To him, that was a shame. Recycling isn’t just a feel-good exercise or good for sustainability purposes — it can seriously save businesses money. “Of course this bothered me from an environmental standpoint, but also from the standpoint of a business person, because recycling in Spokane is about a quarter of the price of trash disposal,” he says. “These buildings were literally throwing money away.”
It wasn’t cost-effective for Engie to work with individual businesses or buildings, so Makinson started Resource Synergy to bring high-level recycling and waste expertise to a smaller, local scale.
Three years in, he’s helped deliver recycling bins to 8,000 individual office desks in the region, and his clients have increased their recycling by 2 million pounds per year — enough to fill a double stacked freight train two-thirds of a mile long, Makinson says. And his work is not only saving thousands for private entities, but filling in gaps in the recycling system left by major state funding cuts.
In recent years, the city of Spokane and Spokane County offices that oversee waste management and recycling have seen funding for educational resources and staffing slashed.
The Department of Ecology helps county and local offices pay for recycling and waste education — think advertisements, printouts, school presentations, classes — as well as things like no-charge household hazardous waste disposal sites, through the Local Solid Waste Financial Assistance grant program. But while $28.2 million was allocated in 2013 to 2015, that dropped to $10 million statewide for the 2017-19 capital budget, leaving little wiggle room for places like Spokane and Spokane County to offer any extra services or expertise.
“We’re trying to stretch our resources,” says Deb Geiger, the Spokane County Regional Solid Waste Coordinator. “Erik has been kind of a boon for the community because with the cuts in the funding from the state, we can’t concentrate, we don’t have enough staff to reach out to the businesses and serve them the way they need to be served. He fills that niche pretty well.”