Keith Lee: Turning Retail Packaging Green
by Christina Lee on December 4th, 2008
As a Carnation, Wash. dairy employee, Keith Lee’s father used to watch large metal vats of ice-cream flavoring get discarded once empty. Then one day, Lee’s father approached his boss with an idea.
“Can I take those out of the trash, and fix them up, and resell them to someone on my own?” he asked. When his boss agreed, Lee’s father took them home to be cleaned. For such a task he recruited his son, who at the time was less than 10 years old.
This early employment became Lee’s first experience with recycling. Since then, he, as president of fixtures and supplies distributor American Retail Supply, has successfully implemented many green measures, in retail packaging and beyond.
The company now offers to business owners plastic bags made with at least 25 percent recyclable material, and entirely recyclable paper bags with at least 95 percent post-consumer material. Meanwhile Lee has written and spoken extensively about retail packaging, and will appear next at the Seattle Gift Show, January 24-27.
A lot of issues he addresses today, both inside and outside of his company, first popped up when he began getting involved in community efforts. For example, he joined the King County Council Solid Waste Committee in Washington to protest a bill banning the use of plastic bags.
“Back then, I thought we were just adding again some factual, scientific data to the whole argument, as opposed to emotional and ‘common’ knowledge,” he said of the plastic recycling process, which others perceive as difficult, wasteful and potentially hazardous.
But now – after helping to introduce King County to a curbside recycling program and a “reduce, reuse, recycle” campaign – he finds that issues are rising again more so out of pure curiosity than ignorance.
When Lee wrote about recyclable retail packaging in a “marketing tip of the week” e-mail a few months ago, his customers responded in record amounts.
“It was a hot button to touch,” he said, later adding, “I was being asked about this for forever – I first got involved 20 years ago. I guess it was just an overwhelming response.”
With such demand in mind, Lee thinks that manufacturers will work harder to make sure recyclable retail packaging materials are readily available. In the meantime though, he says that he will continue to do what he has done over the years.
“Part of my job here is to be a responsible supplier of these products – to know the truth, and to try to use as environmentally conscious of products as we can."