If you don’t already know, CDRA membership is one of the best investments you can make for your business. Here are the top five reasons why:

1. The CDRA helps our members connect and build relationships, the cornerstone of any business. The fact is, we all need each other, as customers, as resources and as an industry network. To make and build these relationships you need to have opportunities, points in time when you come together to learn, grow, or just socialize. The CDRA creates this. We do this at conferences, committee meetings, member visits, and special programs. We also do this through referrals when someone reaches out to our staff or to other CDRA members. This is one of the greatest compliments you can ever receive, because people do business with people they trust, and people refer people to businesses that they trust. If you want people to come to your business and buy your product or services, they must know who you are. The importance of relationships in the success of your business can’t be underestimated, and the CDRA creates opportunities for this to happen.
   
   
2. The CDRA brings together like-minded-people. You would not be in this business without passion and a belief in the value of recovering and recycling construction and demolition materials. We are the only National association who focuses on this material. This is important because our needs are unique and our members are unique. We understand that we are a minority, we understand the volume of material generated, we understand the impact we can have if more of this material is diverted, so we push for it together.
   
   
3. The educational resources and opportunities that the CDRA provides for our members, their employees, and the industry are second to none. Starting with our resource page on our website where we share our research and white papers. After that we have 12 newsletters a year with resources and information. One of our greatest values is the 34 committee meetings led by our member experts throughout the year focused on educating and advancing our industry.
   
   These committees include; Gypsum, End Markets, Shingles, Aggregates, Legislative and Safety. Then to top it off, we have our annual conference and every other year we have our shingle forum. This year we are also launching our Innovation and Education Academy where we will provide a LEED GA preparation course, C&D Operator training course and a Recycling Best Practices training course that will follow shortly after.
   
   
4. Free access to Bill Track 50. One of the greatest impacts on your business is the regulations and policies made in the community or State that you operate in. How do you keep up with all of them and better yet, how do you intervene prior to one being passed that could impact you? This was a question that kept coming up for our members and one that we worked hard to resolve. Legislative research tools can be expensive; Bill Track 50 would cost you 10k annually if you bought it on your own. So, the fact that the CDRA provides Bill Track 50 as a free member benefit, is huge value.
   
   
5. Advocacy and visibility to our industry and our members. One of the things that the CDRA does best is to advocate for and bring attention to our members and our industry. We do this by engaging with National and State organizations such as the EPA and DOT to help educate them toward better policies for our industry.  We speak publicly at conferences and events to promote our industry and the work our members are doing. We do this by highlighting our members and their efforts on our website and social media.
   

Everything in business is measured by ROI, return on investment. When you look at the value of the CDRA compared to the cost of membership, there is no question that the value exceeds the cost. For more information on how you can maximize the value of your membership, please reach out to us at info@cdrecycling.org.