What’s the Recycle Bank

What’s the Recycle Bank?

RecycleBank is a company with offices in New York City and Philadelphia focused on recycling rewards. It does this by measuring the amount of material each home recycles then issuing RecycleBank Points based on the amount of materials recycled. These points can be used at participating local and national rewards partners. Reward points can also be earned through the Visa Gconomy Card, GreenNurture, Kashless, electronics recycling, and by participating in eBay‘s Green Team.^{[1][2][3]
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The following from a 2008 Newsweek article by Keith Naughton on RecycleBank

The company was conceived six years ago when Fordham law student Patrick FitzGerald became transfixed by a New York Times story describing how Gotham was considering ditching recycling because it wasn’t working economically. FitzGerald wondered: Would people recycle more if you gave them a financial incentive? He took that idea to his old high-school chum Ron Gonen, then an MBA student at Columbia University.

But recycling is most prevalent on the coasts. In the Midwest and South, recycling rates are often in the single digits to nonexistent. That’s not driven by some regional lack of virtue. It’s all about economics. In the wide-open spaces in the country’s interior, building a landfill is a cheaper proposition—and so are the fees cities pay to dump there. So there’s less motivation to fill those blue bins. “Technically, everybody is supposed to recycle,” says Bob Novak, a Sioux Falls, S.D., waste hauler who’s bringing RecycleBank to town this month. “But very few are doing everything they could. There’s lots of room for growth.”

RecycleBank makes its money from fees paid by its retail partners for online advertising and other marketing support. It also can make millions splitting the savings cities realize from diverting trash from the dump to “materials recovery facilities” that sort it, crush it and ship it out for reuse. Take Everett, which pays $76 for every ton of garbage it tips into landfills. Since RecycleBank arrived, garbage trucks are picking up 14 tons of recycling a day, instead of 3 tons. That’s 11 tons of trash no longer going to the dump daily. RecycleBank also is compiling a vast database of green consumers it can sell to marketers; the company hopes to service 10 million homes within five years. “RecycleBank doesn’t run the trucks,” says Scott Vitters, a recycling exec at Coke, which has invested $2 million. “They are a marketing tool.”

^{RecycleBank website is here}

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