The Closet Extrovert

We received a letter from the Mayor’s Office at the end of June informing us that The Mayor, the Clean Wilmington Committee and the Wilmington City Council would be implementing its new residential curbside recycling program in our neighborhood on July 17th. The program is called RecycleBank and it looks promising. The limited-area pilot phase runs until December, and if the amount of trash diverted to recycling is high enough, it will be implemented citywide in early 2007.

Here’s how it works:

The city provides each residence with a big blue recycle bin. Each bin has a code number on it that is associated with your address. No sorting is required, all recyclables can be mixed together in the same bin. Here’s the best part. Instead of charging you for picking up the recycling, you get a nominal monetary incentive. The money is added to your RecycleBank account and you redeem it online or by phone in the form of coupons that can be used at over 50 participating retailers (e.g. $5 off your purchase of $50 at Acme, a $5 Starbucks gift card, etc.). The coupons are then mailed to your address.

The amount of your incentive bonus is tied to the amount in your bin, with a monthly cap of $25. They started us out with $5 in our account, and here’s what we received for our first two pickups:

07/25/2006 $6.40
07/18/2006 $6.80

Total in account: $18.20

So, it’s a double bonus; free money and that warm fuzzy feeling you get from helping save the planet!

On the downside, there is an issue with the excess trash at the moment, but it may simply be temporary until everyone adjusts to the new collection schedule. Normally, city garbage collection happens twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays if you live west of I-95, Mondays and Thursdays if you live east of I-95). During the pilot phase, we now have recycling-only collection on Monday or Tuesday, and garbage-only collection on Thursday or Friday. So, thanks to the tenant in my building who put out five extra bags of garbage this week, and no one remembering to take it out to the curb on Thursday evening, we have a lovely stinkfest going on at our place. The flies are buzzing orgiastically. You can be sure I’ll remember to take care of it tonight!

It remains to be seen whether there is simply so much garbage that accumulates on a weekly basis that even with some of it being diverted to recycling one garbage collection day per week isn’t enough, whether residents will embrace the program, and whether it will help the City of Wilmington to divert enough trash from landfills to avoid building another one (at the expense of taxpayers, of course).

I’m hoping the pilot phase proves successful. I really missed being able to recycle easily after moving to Wilmington (without a car, it was nearly impossible for me until now) and it’s nice to get a little monetary incentive as well.

One drawback at the moment is that they gave out only one bin per address; if your building has more than one apartment in it like mine does and you’re sharing a recycling bin, how do you decide who gets the incentive money? In our case, I simply asked our landlord if we could have it, since we seem to be the tenants who take out the trash bins most of the time anyway. Our upstairs neighbor only empties his mailbox once a month, I can’t imagine that he’s going to be any more participatory with recycling!

Related Information (in order of interest):

• DelawareOnline/NewsJournal: Voucher Program Makes Recycling Pay
• Wilmington Mayor’s April 2006 Press Release
• A copy of the contract between RecycleBank and the City of Wilmington
• BioCycle, the Journal of Composting & Organics Recycling: Reinventing Municipal Recycling in America
• The EPA’s Resource Conservation Challenge: You Can Bank on RecycleBank
• PA Environment Digest: Philadelphia/RecycleBank Triple Recycling in Pilot Areas