Skumatz Receives SWANA Recycling Honor

The award was presented to Skumatz during a mid-October awards luncheon held at SWANA’s annual WasteCon Conference, which took place in Reno this year.

The award, not given every year, is intended to honor outstanding and meritorious service to the solid waste field, and is recognized as the “highest accolade the solid waste field bestows,” according to SWANA.

SWANA is comprised of some 7,700 people from the solid waste industry, about 4,000 of whom attended the conference in Reno.

This is Skumatz’s second national lifetime achievement award, following a lifetime achievement recognition from the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) in 2001. Earlier this year, she also received the top lifetime achievement award from the Colorado Association for Recyclers (CAFR) for her dedicated and innovative work in Colorado.

Skumatz owns environmental/sustainability consulting firm Skumatz Economic Research Associates, Superior, Colo. She works across the United States and internationally with her time split equally between the recycling/solid waste management field and the energy efficiency/conservation field. Her work concentrates on measuring the effects of conservation initiatives, assessing best performing programs, and trying to make “green” programs more cost-effective and sustainable.

Her focus on quantitative work has represented a key change in the way solid waste programs were planned and assessed, she claims. As part of her work, she has gathered and analyzed a unique database containing more than 1,300 communities across North America.

She may be best known for her work in Pay As You Throw (PAYT) trash rate incentives, and she has conducted extensive work in “best practices” and policy analysis. She has conducted recycling, PAYT, energy, and sustainability work for clients from Alaska to Florida as well as clients overseas.

Skumatz thanked the SWANA members for the honor, which she said represented “the highlight of my career.” In her remarks she noted the solid waste field is constantly improving, but its progress is, in many ways, invisible to households, even though it is an essential service.