Duncan O'Leary
Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.
I’ve just come across what looks like a brilliant recycling scheme in the US. It’s called RecycleBank and it works like this:
1. Each house gets a recycling container with a barcode on it, that allows the recycling truck to identify what your household in recycling
2. The amount your home recycles is translated into RecycleBank Dollars (paid for by the council through the savings they make on landfill sites)
3. You can spend your RecycleBank dollars at any of the 100 participating stores as and when you accumulate them
4. The more you recycle, the more Recycle dollars you get
Genius. Has anyone has heard of similarly creative ideas/projects in the UK? If so I’d love to hear about them – seeing as the comments are still not working, drop me an email and I’ll post them up if you’d like me to...
Update: Nick Temple at the School for Social Entrepeneurs spotted this last week.
...and Andy Polaine says: "Interesting idea and I'm all for people recycling more, but the problem in the UK is that you can't recycle that much. Here in Germany you can recycle almost all your packaging, even plastic bags and cellophane and polystyrene. That makes a big difference as we all see when we put our 'Gelber Sacs' out once a week and see just how much household packaging waste there is. This, incidentally, is a separate recycling operation from paper (also recycled) and bottles (most of which have 'pfand' or a deposit which means they're re-used for a very long time instead of recycled).
Would paying for people recycling make it more expensive to recycle and the resulting goods more expensive though? Re-using the material is crucial to the process otherwise it's just a feel-good factor.
Recycling tends to be down-cycling anyway (things becoming lower grade goods) which just slows down the journey to the landfill by one or two stops. Working out what to do with the material or upcycling is the key (as the authors of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, explain)"
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Comments
Although seductive, I am not sure about “brilliant”. The scheme seems to me to legitimise the consumption of packaging, rewarding the most wasteful recyclers. Given this, perhaps it would be better to work it the other way around…the scheme should give recycle rewards to the people who fill up their recycling bins the least!
Dr David Low
www.understandascope.com