MORA Mission

To lead Missouri toward environmental sustain-ability through waste reduction and recycling.

MORA Values

We Encourage and Support Waste Reduction

• By providing information, educational opportunities, and technical support in partnership with state, national and regional organizations.
• By providing information and technical support to help consumers, businesses, institutions, and governments to reduce waste, recycle and buy recycled products.
• By reducing waste through consumer purchasing decisions.
• By recovering waste with safe and affordable systems for collection and processing.
• By promoting pollution prevention and the efficient use of resources to protect the air, water and land.

We Foster a Diverse and Active Membership

• By providing a forum for sharing information through workshops, meetings, summits, and an annual conference.
• By encouraging our members to cooperate on a regional level to share experiences and encourage market development for recovered materials.
• By partnering with businesses, institutions, governments and regional organizations to advance education and share resources.

We Promote Sustainability

• By developing local "waste-based" industries to manufacture products from recovered materials.
• By supporting legislation that positively affects waste reduction, waste diversion and recycling efforts in Missouri.
• By reducing demand on natural resources through education, waste reduction and recycling.

MORA’s Guiding Principles – Approved 10/5/2010

Expand Economic Development Through Recycling

Recycling is an important component of Missouri’s current economy and provides future economic development opportunities. The expanded collection, processing, and re-manufacture of recovered materials generates new jobs, tax revenues and markets. Recycling stimulates innovation and entrepreneurship.

Manage Materials, Not Waste

Waste prevention, product stewardship, reuse, recycling and composting significantly reduce the demand for extraction and use of virgin resources, and deliver multiple environmental, economic, and community benefits. These include conserving resources, saving energy, reducing pollution and mitigating the impacts of climate change. The magnitude of these benefits extends far beyond preserving landfill capacity and reducing landfill gas emissions.

Reduce Demand on Natural Resources

The one-way extraction and use of virgin resources for products and packaging that are rapidly discarded to landfills or incinerators is a primary cause of global resource depletion. This creates many environmental, climate and social problems, and is fundamentally unsustainable.

Preserve Embodied Energy and Value

Maximizing the recovery, re-use, recycling, and composting of products and materials in as whole and as useful a form as possible preserves the embodied energy used in production and delivery of thoseproducts.

Use Locally Recovered Resources

Using locally recovered materials to furnish as many of our needs as possible supports local economic development and jobs, and reduces the environmental and climate impacts of longer supply chains. In particular, composted organics should be used as a soil amendment. Concrete, asphalt and other materials recovered from construction and demolition projects should be reused for local infrastructure and development.

Product Stewardship

The growing volume of complex, toxic and over-packaged products increases demand on waste management systems and liabilities associated with these systems. Product stewardship reduces waste net system costs by shifting the fiscal responsibility for product management away from the general public to the producers and consumers of products. This policy uses market competition to encourage product re-design, resource efficiency, less packaging and improved logistics.

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