Build on Your Success
Business cooperatives can grow to provide additional benefits to participants. Once a cooperative is established, the Advisory Committee may decide to expand the number of materials recycled. A cooperative may also help to close the recycling loop by adding a purchasing component for recycled products. A natural fit for a paper recycling cooperative is to add a recycled paper purchasing component.
Step 7: Check List
The Advisory Committee and partnering organizations must monitor the Cooperatives’ initial performance to ensure that it is on its way to sustainability.

Has your Advisory Committee continued to meet since the cooperative was started?
Have you received feedback from participating businesses?
Have you received feedback from the recycling service provider?
Are businesses maintaining their participation rates?
Do you need to make additional outreach efforts into the business community?
Are businesses of all sizes having their needs met through this cooperative?
Did you send out a press release to announce the progress of the cooperative?
Your cooperative may need to be altered to keep up with the changing demands of the recycling markets, the needs of the recycling service provider or the needs of the participating or interested businesses in your community.

Are the needs of all interested businesses being met?
If no, is it possible to renegotiate with your service provider to accommodate these businesses?
If no, is it possible to work within your community to provide other recycling services to these businesses? (i.e., set up additional dropoff sites)
Are there opportunities to expand the cooperative to include additional recyclable materials or to incorporate or increase recycled product purchasing?
Economics

How much will this program cost to start?
Cooperatives can cost a sponsoring organization a great deal to start up, or very little. All cooperatives, whether expensive or not, require time. The cost of this time will determine the start-up costs for the operation.

Funded cooperatives: Staff time
The cooperatives highlighted in this guide all received startup funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s President’s Climate Change Action Plan. This funding enabled several cooperatives to have part-time organizers. The organizers worked with the partners and Advisory Committees to lead the program through step six. These funded coordinators first worked with the community to design and develop a program that was effective for the local businesses, and then worked with the Advisory Committee to develop a turnkey operation. When the coordinators’ funding ran out, they could hand over a sustainable operation to the local community to monitor as they saw fit. It is important to note that in these funded cooperatives, the more involved the Advisory Committee, the quicker the program got up and running. While the funding helped to ease the process, the local volunteer component was critical to reaching the local businesses. Funding for cooperatives may be available from your state or municipal recycling programs.