The Philadelphia Recycling Rewards program is being phased in – collection district by collection district. By July, the entire City will be taking part! To find out when your neighborhood is scheduled to start, click here.
The Center City & South Philadelphia Recycling Rewards Kick-Off took place this past Saturday May 15th at East Passyunk Ave and Tasker Street in South Philadelphia.
The rally was opened by Mayor Nutter and Scott Lamb, COO of Recycle Bank and it featured live music, refreshments, giveaways, games, crafts, Curby Bucket and Sun Ray mascots, and UnLitter Us educational information.
Philadelphia is the largest implementation of the Recycle Bank program in the country.
The city currently dumps about 580,000 tons of waste a year. Research collected by the Recycle Bank shows that Recycling Reward Programs significantly increase the amount of material going into recycling and removed from the trash stream. In 2008, the first year the Township of Cherry Hill NJ implemented the RecycleBank program, Cherry Hill saved more than $400,000 in waste disposal fees.
The objective of the City of Philadelphia is to increase the diversion of trash to Recyclabled materials to 20% by 2011 and 25% by 2015. My questions are:
- What is going to take 5 years to increase the rate of trash diversion to 25%??
- What can we do to speed that up?
- And what are we waiting for to implement a city wide food scrap collection that would be turned into compost??
If San Francisco can do it, why no Philadelphia?
