This week’s Newsweek magazine has an article about RecycleBank. In Everett, Massachusetts, the article says the program has resulted in a 10x increase in recycling. It quotes the mayor as saying, “The recycling buzz is out there; it’s fun filling that thing up to the top.”
As described in the article, the company’s current push to expand into the South and Midwest is about establishing a “conservation culture” in these regions, and keeping trash out of landfills.
The article also says that RecycleBank was still operating at a loss in the most recent financial reporting period, which is consistent with my theory that recycling doesn’t generate big revenues.
At Monday evening’s work session on recycling, the full Council heard about plans to start single-stream recycling on October 1, 2008. Yes, Virginia, we can put all of our recyclables at curbside starting October 1: not just alumninum and steel cans, #1 and #2 plastic bottles, glass bottles, and newspaper, but also mixed paper (office paper, junk mail, magazines, cardboard, phone books, etc.), plastic #1 through #7, and all kinds of plastic bags.
City Manager Jim O’Connor said that he expected to present a proposal for a contract for the Recycle Bank incentive program (see this earlier blog post) at the October 18 City Council meeting (not September 22 as projected earlier). After 3 weeks of cramming all of our recyclables into the current bins (or seeing a wide variety of containers left at curbside to handle the overflow — note that plastic bags or cardboard boxes can used, but both the content and container will be considered as recyclable), I expect that many people will be excited about the idea of a large recycling cart with a cover on it. However, City Council needs to decide whether that cart plus the RecycleBank’s recycling incentives (which are said to average about $20 per month of value for a household) justify charging every household an additional $2 per month. I expect that some households will have difficulty managing the carts — finding a place to keep the cart, getting it to the curb, preventing theft, etc.
The RecycleBank incentive program would come with a 5-year extension to the City’s contract with Waste Connections. The contract already extends to 2016, but the proposal would extend it to 2021 — a whopping 13 years in the future. Back-door garbage collection would continue for the term of the contract. The current cost of $11.22 per household (of which $5 is paid by fees and $6.22 is paid by taxes) and the $2 extra for the incentive program would be adusted upward for increases in the Consumer Price Index, but would not be renegotiated.
Added (Sept 11, 2008): Ray made some worthwhile comments, which I’m addressing here in addition to commenting on his comment.
R: Is handing out coupons an incentive? I was afraid of this, once again, a good effort to increase recycling participation in Oak Ridge comes with a price tag of $2.73 a month per household to increase retail in Oak Ridge. People, we can recycle more and not incur the cost …
E: For the record, the proposed price is $2 per month, not $2.73. The company says that people can expect to receive promotional coupons worth an average of $20 per month per household. I share your concern that the coupons might not be as worthwhile as advertised, but at the same time I figure that as long as their perceived value is more than $2 per month, people will feel like we’re ahead of the game. (Also, part of that $2 fee is needed to pay off the investment in the recycling carts, which I figure are worth somewhere near $100 each at retail.) Also, note that households will not be issued coupons directly, but will be given points that can be redeemed toward various “deals.” If even some of the coupons are good for “$10 off on a purchase of any size” at businesses where we actually buy stuff, I think we’ll feel that they are worthwhile. The Recycle Bank spokespeople told EQAB that the most popular rewards are for grocery stores and drug stores.
R: I have coupons in my mail, newspaper, credit cards, store cards, and online. Everyone I spoke with says they want to be able to spend these coupons on the $2.73 cents charge Recycle Bank sends us and to use these coupons on the $5 waste charge on our utility bills. This will increase participation.
E: It would be nice if we could get actual cash (or a reduction in the bill) as a reward for recycling, but the sad fact is that the market value of our recyclables is not high enough to provide a meaningful payback. The purpose of the promotional incentive is to encourages more people to recycle more stuff, so we send less stuff to the landfill, waste less energy and water in production of new virgin materials, and boost the recycling economy — the more we recycle, the more markets there will be for recycled materials.
R: Have you used PriceLine Groceries when it was a start up business like Recycle Bank? They are out of business now Ellen. I do not believe this company will make it till 2021, what happens then?
E: I never used PriceLine Groceries, but you have an excellent point regarding the possible longevity of the company. The City will need to make sure that any contract we sign lets us get off the hook if the Recycle Bank service stops being available — or if the quality and value of the promotional incentives declines significantly.
R: Do we get to keep the big plastic cart with an information tracker that allows them to sell my information to advertisers and spammers? Does this company provide a privacy policy for its customers?
E: Data privacy is definitely a concern. The RecycleBank has a privacy policy that says (in part): “We do not rent, sell or share your personal information or program activity to anyone without your express consent. We may share information with municipalities and haulers about the frequency with which you recycle and the weight or volume of the material you recycle but not about the content of this material. We may also share information with others about the aggregate volume or weight of material recycled by many households, including yours.”
Last week the local papers had some positive news regarding the Oak Ridge mall property: the prospective developers are doing test drilling for a “geothermal” HVAC system on the site.
Of course, a “green” HVAC system is not much use at a shopping center unless the center has some commercial tenants to use the conditioned space, but I choose to see this as good news. This kind of “green” feature is the kind of thing that could give a commercial development a special identity — to entice customers to choose to shop there.
Now here’s hoping for some good tenants to complete the package!
There’s great news for Oak Ridgers who have been wishing for our curbside recycling collection to include mixed paper recycling and all types of recyclable plastic. Starting October 1, we’ll have “single stream recycling.” That means that all forms of recyclables will be collected at curbside, loaded into the truck, and hauled off to the Advanced Polymer Recycling (APR) facility in Knoxville to be sorted and shipped to end users. They’ll take all kinds of paper, glass bottles, aluminum cans, steel cans, and plastic numbers 1-7 (including plastic bags, but not styrofoam — although even styrofoam might be added in the future), and APR assures us that the collected material will be recycled (not sent to a landfill).
Our Environmental Quality Advisory Board (EQAB) had a presentation on August 7* (I was there) where personnel from Waste Connections (the city’s waste hauler) and APR told about the new recycling program.
EQAB also heard about the Recycle Bank program that could significantly increase our recycling participation by giving people incentives to recycle. For a fee of about $2 per month per household, residents would be provided with a 65-gallon wheeled collection cart outfitted with an RFID tag. The cart would hold far more material than we can put in the 18-gallon bins we have now, and when bins are picked up at curbside the household’s recycling “contributions” would be automatically weighed and recorded. Households would be credited with points based on the weight of the material they recycled, and points could be used to obtain discount coupons and other valuable benefits contributed by the Recycle Bank’s local and national business sponsors. According to the Recycle Bank personnel who spoke to EQAB, the typical household generates enough recyclable material to earn $20 worth of rebates each month, which they describe as a 10-to-1 return for the $2 fee.
The Recycle Bank program has been operating in the northeast — mostly in the Philadelphia area — for a couple of years, and they are now branching out to other regions. Based on experience in other cities, Waste Connections and the Recycle Bank figure that Oak Ridge would go from 45% participation in curbside recycling to 80-85% participation, and we’d increase our recycling from 10% of the solid waste stream to about 33%. That’s a 25% reduction in waste sent to the landfill and a substantial benefit to the environment, saving landfill space, saving trees that would be processed into paper, saving some energy and water that would be used in producing commodities from virgin material, and reducing emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases from mining, logging, and processing. It also reduces costs for waste hauling and landfill fees, but because (1) the city has a collection contract with Waste Connections and (2) Anderson County pays tipping fees at the landfill (for waste collected in the Anderson County part of Oak Ridge), it’s not clear to me how much of that savings the city government would see.
City Council is scheduled to hear about these new recycling opportunities at a work session on September 8, and I expect that on September 22 we will have a vote on joining the Recycle Bank program. There are a few wrinkles to be worked out (for example, not all Oak Ridge households have a sidewalk or driveway on which they could roll a heavy wheeled container to the street), but it looks to me like this is something that Oak Ridgers will embrace.
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*There was a similar presentation in Knoxville on August 13 for area governments, reported by the News Sentinel the following day. That article made it sound like Knoxville is the only community considering these changes, but that’s not the case. According to Waste Connections, Oak Ridge accounts for about half of their curbside recycling customers in all of East Tennessee. They figure that if the Recycle Bank program is going to happen anywhere in the region, Oak Ridge will have it first.
