Recyclebank is an organization that encourages green environmental practices through such strategies as education, content delivery, selling sustainable products, partnering with municipalities to drive recycling efforts, and rewarding members with points for green activities—which can be used for discounts and products.
“The mission is to leverage information and rewards to make a difference, to move the needle, on this big problem of waste that we have in the U.S.,” says CEO Javier Flaim.
The goal is to develop loyalty to recycling itself. Recyclebank is a behavior-change platform that educates members, rewards recycling activities with points and similar to how many more-traditional loyalty programs operate while employing innovative approaches, and strives to not only create environmental impact but also to show it off by demonstrating results.
It’s a principle that all marketers can benefit from. First, deliver value—that, of course, is the prime reason for any business’s existence. But as important, make sure your key stakeholders understand that value has been delivered.
Recyclebank’s value is creating a greener, cleaner, safer and more sustainable environment. Less landfill, greater reuse. It’s a psychological reward for residents and communities participating in the program, but Recyclebank doesn’t rely purely on feelings of altruism to encourage recycling and to motivate its partners to do their part in encouragement.
And in fact, Recyclebank employs multiple value-delivery and value communication systems.
"As an educational platform, it's important that we continue to innovate around three key areas,” says Flaim. “One is how do we truly continue to measure and display impact? Because that's ultimately the ROI. First, are we impacting waste and recycling? What can we do on a resident-engagement level to play back the impact that an individual has?”
Allow participants to see the power of dealing with Recyclebank—which is applies to businesses in general. Let the consumer/participant see the value of engaging with a brand. For example in a different field, don’t just sell groceries—help the consumer understand how the products being purchased make the consumer’s life more fulfilling, healthier, less stressful, more fun, and so on. Don’t leave it to the consumer to interpret impact—educate the consumer about the impact.
“That is an important area, and we have innovated around the impact tracker so people are able to measure the individual impact that they're having based on how much they or their community are doing,” Flaim says. “And that's a live impact tracker that we show on our website. Trying to measure and display impact—we know that that's a critical element of behavior change.”
Recyclebank measures recycling results in multiple ways. “If you’re on our site and you don’t have curbside pickup, you interact with our site and pledge to recycle cans, for instance, we roll that up and project the potential impact—that’s kind of inferred.” Or in some cases, “We are able to measure individual weights of recycling in certain communities.” In those communities, participating residents are issued collection bins with RFID tags, and special trucks weigh the bin as its contents are collected and record the weight along with an identifying number to associate the pickup with an individual. “Otherwise we measure at the route/community level.”
“Bucket #2 in terms of how we're looking to innovate and drive value is making sure we're providing value back—to the client and to the member and resident, says Flaim. “That’s everything from education and content we provide, to the type of rewards that we give back to our members. We try to innovate in terms of driving better value back—what we can give back to the resident and to the community for participation.” Give-backs can include green school programs, grants, sweepstakes, sustainable-product commerce, and so on.
“The third leg,” says Flaim, “is advertisers and sponsors.” They want participation in and association with community programs, being part of the holistic offering. For example, Johnson & Johnson is an advertiser/sponsor, and they conducted a study that showed that only a small portion of recyclable products in the bathroom actually are recycled. So they work with Recyclebank to educate people on how to recycle used containers and such.
In all, it’s a chicken-egg sort of challenge, to get more municipalities involved in recycling, to engage with the Recyclebank platform, to drive consumer awareness, to motivate consumer participation with a rewards structure, which in turn prompts greater participation by municipalities. Much of the success of Recyclebank is built on awareness—awareness of not only the need for this environmental initiative, but also as important, on the impact of the effort.