Keeping Your Store Beautiful

This week’s Convenience Matters tells retailers the importance of offering customers ways to recycle and reduce litter.

April 25, 2018

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – On this week’s episode of Convenience Matters, “Clean Stores are Good for Business,” NACS hosts Jeff Lenard and Carolyn Schnare talk with Mike Rosen, chief marketing officer for Keep America Beautiful, about the power of a clean store. “Clean … communicates that you care about the environment, you care about your business and you care about customers,” Lenard said.

With more retailers offering takeaway food, providing ways to combat litter is essential to keeping a store clean. Keep America Beautiful is working on a third update to its 1969 study on the litter habits of Americans. “We look at the sources of litter, pedestrian areas and key transition points, littering behavior, and the cost of littering,” Rosen said. “We talk about cigarette butt litter, which remains the number one form of litter in America.”

Rosen emphasized that while people still litter, there has been great strides over the years. “There were a lot of positive signs” between 1969 and 2009, when the study was first updated, he said. “Visible litter on our nation’s roadways had decreased by some 60-plus percent over that 40 year period. Paper, metal, glass beverage container [litter] had decreased during that time period as well.”

There’s an economic, social and environmental benefit when recycling is improved, which in turn reduces litter. “What we need are the stakeholders in recycling, businesses, nonprofits like KAB, associations, and government entities … to work together to help improve that stream recycle materials, so we can create new products,” Rosen said.

NACS has many tools to help retailers recycle and reduce litter, including the “Be a Good Neighbor” guide put together in conjunction with Keep America Beautiful.

Each week a new Convenience Matters episode is released. The weekly podcast can be downloaded on iTunes, Google Play Music and Stitcher and at www.conveniencematters.com. Episodes have been downloaded by listeners more than 39,000 times in more than 95 countries.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement