It's no shock that most companies are realizing that 'being green' is in, and it's their responsibility to ensure they are helping instead of hurting the problem. Here are some major companies that have created fun and engaging ways of getting more people to recycle their products:
Coke's latest European advertising campaign sees it thinking about the environment, and specifically how it can best encourage its loyal customers to dispose of their bottles and cans in a responsible and recyclable manner.
Knowing that festival-goers often find themselves slaking their thirst without any regard for what happens to the now-drained drinking vessel, asked ad agency Publicist Italy to conjure up a series of in-situ hoardings which subtly and playfully encouraged consumers do the right thing and chuck their rubbish in the right bin. They redesigned their logo to playfully point to a recycling bin nearby so encourage more recycling and help people find these bins easier.
Debuting at a festival in Bulgaria, the environmentally-minded examples of good-natured wayfaring helped the event see an 85% rate of correct Coca-Cola can recycling.
AdAge reports that: “Coke was also environmentally strategic about placement of the signs—their locations were chosen based on where pre-existing or new recycling bins would get maximum visibility and use.”
Taco Bell has launched a nationwide pilot program in partnership with recycling company TerraCycle to reuse empty sauce packets. Consumers simply make an account with TerraCycle, collect their used packets of Taco Bell sauces in a box, and mail them for free to TerraCycle, where they'll be melted down and recycled into hard plastic products. Full instructions can be found in Taco Bell stores and at tacobell.com/terracycle.
8.2 billion Taco Bell packets are used and thrown away in the United States each year, contributing to landfills and plastic pollution. The company has committed to finding sustainable solutions and promised that all of its consumer-facing packaging will be reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025.
Territorians who want to help the environment, and their hip pockets, have another reason to visit Casuarina Shopping Village from today with the introduction of Envirobank’s Reverse Vending Machine designed to make it easier to recycle aluminium cans, glass and PET bottles---and get paid for it.
The RVM unveiled at Casuarina today on World Environment Day by Coles Supermarkets and Envirobank is the first of its kind to offer customers the opportunity to exchange their bottles and cans for supermarket vouchers via Envirobank’s Crunch Platform. The automated machine makes it easier and more convenient for everyone to get involved in the Territory’s innovative container deposit scheme.
The Cash for Containers scheme allows Territorians to return eligible drink containers between 150ml and 3 liters and collect a 10-cent deposit, reducing the number of recyclable materials going to landfill and providing extra income for many individuals and community groups
The new Reverse Vending Machine from Envirobank, an Indigenous-owned company, makes it as simple to recycle a drink container as it is to buy one. It doesn’t require an operator and allows people to recycle containers one at a time rather than having to collect and store them in bulk.
Sophie Wong, State General Manager for South Australia and the Northern Territory for Coles, said the initiative with Envirobank was in line with the company’s commitments to sustainability and support of the indigenous business sector.
“It makes sense on so many levels. Coles has a strong public commitment to sustainability and this is a great opportunity for us to work with our customers to stop empty drink containers ending up on the streets, our waterways or in the landfill,” Ms Wong said.
“It also makes it more convenient for our customers. Now they can recycle their used drink containers at the same time as doing their weekly shop. As a bonus, they’ll also have a little extra money in their pockets to put towards their grocery bill,” she said.
The grey box that stands at the entrance of a Morrisons supermarket in north London isn’t much to look at, but some say it could offer a solution to our out-of-control plastic bottle addiction.
This branch of Morrisons in Wood Green is one of a number of supermarkets and retailers around the UK to trial reverse vending machines for plastic bottles, encouraging shoppers to feed in their empties in exchange for store credit. It may seem like a novel idea, but such machines are already in use in 38 countries, and are proven to drive up return rates of bottles by as much as 98 percent. In contrast, the UK currently only recycles 43 percent of the maddening 13 billion plastic bottles we go through every single year.
You feed the bottle in – it has to have a barcode or it won’t register – and you get 50 points, equivalent to 5 Pounds, on your Morrisons loyalty card. You can only put through 20 bottles at a time, and you can only credit one per shop.
The reverse-vending units accept any of the chain’s own-brand beverage bottles and repay users with a 10p voucher to be used in-store for each bottle inserted. Once bottles are captured, they are cleaned and sent to recycling facilities.
Iceland today posted an update on the scheme’s results, revealing that more than one million plastic bottles have been captured using the network of machines to date.
The retailer has also been asking customers what they make of the machines during the scheme, with 95% of shoppers to have responded to its survey having said they believe deposit return systems should be operated by all UK retailers.
ReciclApp is filling a void in places where door-to-door recycling simply doesn’t exist. What if there was a way to connect the collector on the street directly to the massive waste streams that exist in Chile, and to the companies that pay decent money for recyclables? That's how a recycling app startup, called ReciclApp, was born.It works like this: individuals, businesses, and institutions download the free app. Once they have cans, boxes or bottles to get rid of, they declare specific numbers in the app and choose a date and time period for pickup. From that data, the company creates and prints out routes for the collectors they work with. There are now an average of 200 collectors working with ReciclApp across Chile, and about 1,000 app users in the country.
For collectors, it's an efficient route with guaranteed recyclables, and they keep all the money they make. Lara's team cuts out the middleman transporters who would previously take the material to large recycling companies. ReciclApp even has designated storage centres where collectors can leave material before a truck from large recyclers shows up.
So what's the big deal? In Chile there are no municipal, curbside recycling programs. None. And that goes for much of Latin America. Official figures show that Chile produces about 17 million tons of garbage per year. Less than 10 percent of that gets recycled. Compare that to Canada, where about 48 percent of residential waste gets recycled—or the US, where the figure is roughly 35-45 percent.
Local governments pay ReciclApp an average of $1,200 USD per month, mainly because the service reduces their garbage collection expenses. Lara estimates that there are about 100,000 people trying to earn money from recycling in Chile. Those that work with ReciclApp have more than doubled their recycling earnings on average from about $100 USD per month to $250 USD. But even that, Lara admitted, is a small gain when you consider Chile's high cost of living.
In Chile, it's still an uphill battle to develop a culture of recycling. Only two years ago, Lara himself didn't recycle. But now he has put his civil engineering studies on hold to dedicate himself to ReciclApp full time. On top of that, a new recycling law should make it easier for companies like his to expand."What we want to instill in people is that we should recycle because it's our duty, because we have to save the world."
Nestlé is on a mission to do its bit for the planet, having committed to using 100% recyclable and reusable packaging by 2025. Its latest step forward involves a huge part of its business: Nestlé Japan’s KitKat packaging. Famously available in a variety of flavours and sold by the bucketload to tourists and chocoholics alike, the brand is now switching some of its packaging from plastic to paper and expecting to save 380 tonnes of plastic every year as a result.
The new packaging will only affect its big bags of miniature KitKat bars, but it’s a start. As part of its campaign around the roll-out, Nestlé Japan is encouraging purchasers to use the paper for their origami creations, depicting a folded paper crane on the front of packets. The company says it hopes to expand the paper packaging to other products soon.
Last month, Nestlé introduced a recyclable paper wrapper for its Yes! snack bar, becoming the first brand to do so in a market that has historically only used plastic film wrappers. The technology was developed in the UK at Nestlé’s confectionery research and development centre in York and has been launched in 13 countries so far.
Yesterday it emerged that McDonald’s – which recently underwent a global brand identity redesign by Turner Duckworth – had introduced paper straws that cannot actually be recycled. Having stopped using plastic straws, which could be recycled, in favour of paper ones in all its UK branches, the company announced yesterday that these should be put in the general waste as their thickness makes it difficult for them to be processed by recycling facilities.
