City of Atlanta’s New Incentive Based Recycling Program
The City of Atlanta’s Department of Public Works is teaming up with RecycleBank to launch a pilot program that will reward residents for recycling!
The ReCART program just launched at the end of October, with weigh ins starting in mid-November. Right now, there are 10,000 households participating in the program, and each one received a special bin. When the city collects their recycling each week, they weigh the bins. The more you recycle, the more rewards you collect! Easy peasy!
So what’s to stop you from filling your bin with trash? According to the ReCART program website:
If non-recyclable items are placed in the cart, the collectors will flag the address and a notification will be mailed to the address. If the address receives three flagged occurrences, recycling collection will be discontinued. Placing items that are not recyclable in your cart will negatively affect your RecycleBank account and can jeopardize the program for your neighbors.
If you’re not sure what belongs in your bin the City of Atlanta Website has a quick list you can check that outlines what is and is not allowed.
Coca Cola is helping sponsor the ReCART pilot as part of their Give it Back program. With their help, the city was able to team up with RecycleBank, a private company that handles the rewards portion of the program.
RecycleBank has a ton of different places where you can redeem your recycling rewards. In April of this year, the United Nations Environment Program designated the company a Champion of the Earth.
This program seems like genius to me! So many households don’t recycle because it’s too much work or there doesn’t seem to be a tangible benefit. By offering rewards, RecycleBank and ReCART take the debate out of the picture. A rewards-based program like this has potential to keep so much recyclable waste out of the landfill by giving folks a concrete reason to maintain a recycle bin!
With programs in 13 states – 14 if you count the pilot program here in Atlanta – RecycleBank has made a huge impact already. At the time of this posting, they’d reported recycling over 170,000 tons of paper!
My house unfortunately wasn’t selected for the pilot program, but you can bet I’ll sign up as soon as they open the program to the whole city!
Image Credit: RecycleBank. Creative Commons photo by dreamymo
Special thanks to my pal Liz for hipping me to this program.
Sure, consumer and citizen recycling is good, but this project rubs me the wrong way…maybe because it’s SO typically Atlanta. Leave it to the corporations to provide public services, and make sure it’s the ones making a major contribution to the problem they’re purporting to solve while shirking from responsibility. As long as folks are getting presents from Coke, then why should they bother to ask where all of our trash comes from. Meanwhile, which neighborhoods did they pick? Hopefully they pick ones where folks can afford home computers and internet connections because that’s the only way to participate.
I learned a thing or two when I started a recycling program at at Title 1 Atlanta Public middle school near the West Lake MARTA Station a few years ago (for geographic context, you may remember Purple Ribbon All-Star’s line in Kryptonite (I’m on it): Simpson Road Dixie Hills.. That neighborhood). That neighborhood got zero curbside pick up service while we did over there in Inman Park/Little Five/Candler Park yadda yadda. And once we got a recycling dumpster at the school, everyone was all about it.
So this is to say…we could just provide people with appropriate services, invest in every neighborhood, and quit perpetuating the problem by waiting around for corporations to give us presents to buy us off and keep us from really making a change.
/rant