Philadelphia Residents Discover it Pays to Recycle

RecycleBank, a Philadelphia- based non-profit group, encourages residents to recycle by simplifying the process and by distributing coupons to spend at local businesses.

RecycleBank has been covering about 5,000 homes in two Philadelphia neighborhoods and some areas of suburban Philadelphia since January 2005, improving one of the nation's worst recycling records. The program attracts users by allowing people to accumulate all their glass, plastic, aluminum, cardboard and newspaper in one container rather than requiring separate bins. The single recycle bin is emptied by the local garbage collector. Participating households also earn "RecycleBank dollars" which are accumulated according to the weight of recycled trash. The "dollars," up to $400 a year per household, are donated by about 150 local businesses, which seek to generate goodwill with shoppers and entice them with discounts of 10 or 20 percent. The city of Philadelphia benefits from the reduced amount of rubbish it must dispose of, and it pays half of the savings to RecycleBank. More than 90 percent of households in the pilot-program neighborhood now recycle, up from less than 25 percent at the beginning of 2005. But the city disputes that savings figure and has resisted taking RecycleBank citywide because it says the program would add to the city's costs by $12 million to $18 million a year. http://www.recyclebank.com/  

Reuters News Service 2006. 

For more information on developing recycling programs, contact info@fxbrowne.com.