Waste not Kingston in talks with RecycleBank By LYNN WOODS

Waste not
Kingston in talks with RecycleBank
By LYNN WOODS

Although Kingston has been picking up recyclables from the curb since 1991, less than 12 percent of households bother to put out their blue recycle bins every week. All those recyclable items thrown into the trash cost the city a pretty penny in disposal costs, besides taking up precious landfill space. The problem is how to motivate residents to do their part and recycle.

A Philadelphia-based company called RecycleBank has an answer: Offer incentives, in the form of redeemable coupons at local stores, to compel households to recycle more of their waste. Kingston city Alderman Bill Reynolds heard about the company on public radio station WAMC while riding home from work one night. He mentioned it to some of his colleagues in City Hall and community activist and resident Rebecca Martin, who contacted RecycleBank and helped set up meetings with the city’s elected officials.

The upshot: Kingston could become the first municipality in New York state to sign on with the innovative firm to pick up its recyclables. This month, Mayor James Sottile and several alderpersons will visit Clayton, located in southern New Jersey, to see RecycleBank’s program in action.

Clayton is one of more than a dozen municipalities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware that have contracted with RecycleBank. The company has launched a pilot program in Philadelphia, and its program in Wilmington has increased that city’s recycling rate from almost nothing to more than 50 percent, according to RecycleBank CEO and co-founder Ron Gonen. Gonen said his firm is currently starting programs in New England and is in negotiations with cities across the county.

The appeal of the company’s business model to elected officials in Kingston is first and foremost financial: in 2006, the city paid $736,000 to Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA), the public benefit corporation that manages the disposal of the county’s solid waste, much of which ends up in a landfill in western New York.

RecycleBank would charge the city $192,000 a year for picking up its recyclables. But because the company guarantees a recycling rate of 30 percent, the city would save $287,000 annually in tipping fees, representing a net savings of about $95,000 a year, according to Steve Noble, Kingston’s environmental educator.

One of the firm’s innovations is its utilization of radio frequency identification, or RFID, transponders, in which stored data on a chip is transmitted to a remote reader by means of a radio signal; the technology is used widely by companies like Wal-Mart to track and manage inventory. RecycleBank provides each household with a 32-gallon wheeled container that is fitted with a RFID chip containing the household’s account number and other data. The company also outfits the municipal collection trucks with a computer, which scans the chip as the containers are emptied, recording the volume by weight and matching it to the particular account.

Coffee on them

Points are rewarded to each account based on the recyclables’ weight, which can be redeemed for coupons at Starbucks, Staples, Home Depot and other chains, as well as local businesses. The rewards average about $300 worth of coupons per household in a year, said Gonen.

The balance for each account is maintained online at the RecycleBank Web site. Participants log on to redeem their points for coupons some of which can be used to order online and also to find out what how many trees they’ve saved and oil they have not consumed as a result of their recycling efforts. The estimate is in part based on the calculation that 12 percent of the amount recycled will consist of paper products, Gonen said.

Education is an important part of the program’s value, he noted. “We try to promote sustainable consumption practices. We want people to understand what’s recyclable,” with the aim of reducing consumption of those items that aren’t, notably plastic bags and Styrofoam, Gonen said. Most everything people buy is recyclable; participants can even mail in their old cell phones to the firm. In some communities, RecycleBank sponsors “e-waste” recycling days, in which people can bring in their discarded computers, faxes and other electronic equipment.

Because RecycleBank is responsible for maintaining the household recycle containers and for achieving the 30 percent recycling rate, it would seem participating communities have little to lose. One sticking point for Kingston, however, is that the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA) would have to convert the current dual-stream system paper is recycled separately from glass, metal and plastic to a single-stream system in which paper is mixed in with the other recyclables.

This would require an investment in upgrading or replacing the current machinery used by the UCRRA, according to Noble. “We’re currently in talks with UCRRA to see our options. We’re also working with some actual buyers of the recycled material to see if they’re interested in investing in this.”

Noble said that a single-stream system is the way to go in any case, resulting in efficiencies that would increase the profitability of recyclables and potentially attract other municipalities to the Kingston facility, which could become a profit center.

Because the single-stream system required by RecycleBank would result in a reduction of the trucks needed to make pickups, from the current four per week to two (one for recycles, the other for garbage), there might be union resistance, as well.

However, the benefits are intriguing enough that the city leaders have committed to the visit to Clayton. “We’ll be opening up a dialog between ourselves, folks from the unions and the community so people understand what this is all about,” said Reynolds, who represents the 7th Ward. “I’d love for us to get off the ground with this by next year.”

Once signed on with the municipality, RecycleBank would approach local businesses. “Our relationship with local businesses has been phenomenal,” said Gonen. “They get great advertising out of our program.”

Gonen formerly worked for Deloitte Consulting and has a Master of Business Administration degree from Columbia Business School. Looking for a socially responsible business model, he and a high school buddy sketched out the idea for RecycleBank on a napkin over dinner one night. The startup was launched in 2004 with seed money from private equity firms RRE Ventures and Sigma Partners, along with $100,000 from Columbia University.

Gonen said the company, which currently has 35 employees and offices in New York City and Philadelphia, has been “careful in how quickly we scale. We’ve taking time to implement the program so we have the opportunity to see what works.”

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