The Recycling Partnership, a national nonprofit that applies corporate funding to improve recycling efforts in communities across the country, has announced results of three pilot programs in American cities.
In Atlanta, Denver and Chicago, The Recycling Partnership teamed up with city officials to educational programs aimed at helping cities develop a deeper understanding of their recycling programs and find solutions that can be adopted full scale. Wastedive.com reported the following results for each city:
- Atlanta: The city’s collection trucks were already using an app developed by Rubicon Global, so the technology company worked to develop a new contamination tracking app for inspectors. That will be available to Atlanta going forward and could potentially be used as a standalone in other cities.
- Denver: The initial plan for Denver was to focus on cardboard, but the city decided that cans were a higher priority after finding large amounts of them in the baseline characterization study. Among many takeaways from Denver, Marshall noted traditional mailers and cart tags were more effective than social media campaigns.
- Chicago: has publicly struggled with its curbside recycling efforts in recent years, the education campaign was an even bigger focus. Working with Recycle By City this went citywide, and was boosted by additional grant funding from Target and Coca-Cola.
Since 2015, The Recycling Partnership has invested more than $27 million of corporate funding in recycling infrastructure.
In addition to towns, companies have also poured resources into recycling efforts. Just this week, Garnier, the French cosmetics brand owned by L’Oreal, announced it is again working with TerraCycle and DoSomething.org on a campaign to educate the younger generations on how to recycle beauty and personal care products. The campaign – Rinse, Recycle, Repeat – includes a college campus competition to collect “beauty empties” which, once collected, will be turned into pelletized lumber and create materials like picnic tables, playground equipment, benches, and garden beds to build Garnier Green Gardens. The campaign is part of L’Oreal’s focus on becoming a “circular economy” – a focus which can, according to some reports, enhance sales and value for beauty brands.