The Recycling Research Foundation (RRF)

The mission of The Recycling Research Foundation (RRF), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is to “promote the art and science of scrap processing and recycling through research, sponsorships, technical assistance, and educational programs for the purpose of advancing the industry.” RRF also administers the financial side of the academic scholarship programs some ISRI chapters sponsor.

Released in August 1977, the report identified a 636 million-ton reservoir of ferrous scrap at the end of 1975, “enough to blanket all of Washington, D.C., with nearly 100 feet of iron and steel discards.” (The foundation updated this study three times in subsequent years, with the final report—published at the end of 1981—finding an inventory of almost 683 million tons of ferrous scrap.) The report from phase three of the study, “Price-Volume Relationships for the Supply of Scrap Iron and Steel: A Study of the Price Elasticity of Supply,” appeared in January 1979. First, says RRF Vice President David Borsuk of Sadoff & Rudoy Industries (Fond du Lac, Wis.), is simply to “increase the awareness of the foundation as a scholarship program.”

Further, Borsuk says, the foundation would like to encourage the chapters that have scholarship programs to increase the number of scholarships they award annually and to motivate chapters that do not have scholarship programs to establish them. Another RRF priority, Borsuk says, is “to work with the industry to identify appropriate research and development programs RRF can facilitate for the benefit of the industry in total.” It’s a challenge, however, to decide which topics merit a full-fledged research project and which have the greatest application to and benefit for the whole industry, he notes. The study also “could examine the relationship between discharge quality and the use of stormwater best management practices” to create “reliable statistics for the efficiency of BMPs used to manage stormwater-discharge quality.” Whether it pursues this stormwater study or research on something entirely different, RRF will continue to stand— after 41 years—as an invaluable support for the scrap industry, the association, and those chapters with scholarship programs.

Read original PDF document: http://www.isri.org/docs/default-source/rrf/rrf-article.pdf?sfvrsn=2