is research director of RecycleBank,
a new program operating in several Northeast municipalities
that rewards recyclers with coupons they can use at businesses
such as Starbucks, Home
Depot, Whole Foods and Patagonia.
Photo credit: Jill Stoddard
The Earth Engineering Center (EEC) at the Earth
Institute at Columbia University has helped to launch a company
that uses an innovative rewards system to increase household recycling. The
company, RecycleBank,
operates under the belief that recycling rates go up when people
are paid to recycle.
With this new program, residents use a recycling
bin with an embedded computer chip; garbage trucks are retrofitted
to include a scale and a scanner; residents put their recyclables
in the bin; the truck scans and weighs the bin, recording the amount
each household recycles. Residents receive “RecycleBank
Dollars” as rewards, coupons they can use to shop at over
150 partnering businesses, including Starbucks, Home Depot, Whole
Foods and Patagonia.
EEC doctoral student and RecylceBank research
director, Scott Kaufman, meets with stakeholders and helps with
the company’s strategic
planning. He explained, “Our business partners get free advertising
because they get their names into people’s homes. And they can
trace what effect their philanthropic efforts are having on their
businesses, because people who use the coupons end up buying other
things as well.” Households then get coupons to spend at
businesses of their choice.
Kaufman’s involvement with RecycleBank started
in the company’s
early days. He was lead author of the “2004 State of Garbage in
America,” an
annual survey of waste management practices across all 50 states,
run by BioCycle, one of the leading waste industry journals. Columbia
Business School alumni, Ron Gonen, who co-founded RecylceBank with
Patrick Fitzgerald, saw Kaufman’s name and Columbia e-mail address
in BioCycle and contacted him, asking him to join the company.
Kaufman did shortly afterwards.
Kaufman has been working on optimizing recycling
systems as part of his Ph.D. work, so his knowledge helped in starting
and running RecycleBank. The company has also benefited from its
partnership with the EEC, which under the leadership of Professor
Nickolas J.Themelis, Director of the Earth Engineering Center,
has been researching municipal solid waste management since the
late 1990s.
In return, Kaufman said, RecycleBank’s tracking system gathers
information on recycling on a household-to-household basis, which
helps both his, and the EEC’s, work. “There’s nothing even
remotely close to that level of precision in the industry,” he
said.
RecycleBank has been operating in Philadelphia
for over a year, and is now expanding to the New Jersey and Pennsylvania
suburbs; Wilmington, DE; and communities throughout New England
and the rest of the Northeast. Talks
for further expansion into other municipalities are in also progress.
