Lots of good comments on more efficient business practices being the best way to sell sustainability, so I won’t be redundant.
But I have to say if I hear one more (well meaning…) person preaching about sustainability without doing the homework on basic business principles I am going to lose it.
Telling business decision makers that their decisions suck because they just create land fill is not going to change the way a company does business. Worse than that it numbs the audience to the actual opportunities.
Keep the message positive, read up on this thread and look into case studies about how people like Preserve, Evo Design and Page PD (Toothbrushes, Razors, and Houseware from Recycled Plastic-Preserve.eco) have launched several successful products using recycled materials in mainstream venues.
They used good design process, considered the short comings of their material streams and solved the issues that recycled plastic presented. They managed their material sources to get consistent post consumer waste steam sources and produced injection molding tools that could be adjusted to deal with the unpredictable material flow from reground polymers.
They really impressed at the MassArt presentation they conducted last year.