reduce! reuse! recycle!

Through out my school days I constantly heard this message and saw my community actively participating in efforts to transform the words into action. Every Wednesday recyclables went to the curb and were picked up to be taken to a recycle facility. When the recession began to hit communities across the county, slowly city budgets (including my own) cut their funding for curbside recycle programs.

Some local high school students recognized that even though the city could not afford to pay solid waste fees the consumer had become conscious of the environmental need for recycling and there was a market for curbside recycle pickup. for a small fee the high school students would pickup recycle and drive it to a local recycle facility, where they would receive payment for the recyclable material that they had collected.

This inspired me to consider that maybe this is how recycle programs should run nationwide? Maybe recycle could become a tool for social mobility and not a just a poorly perceived socio-economic grind job. Maybe students could receive scholarship money to run the service and use their hard work to pay their way through college.

I made a quick video, 30 second pitch that defined how the student run service could work as a franchise model and submitted it to a competition with the Environmental Protection Agency. Here it is.

To see if my idea had any legs I submitted grant applications to start a scholarship fund with the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) in Washington DC and with the Civic Innovation Lab in Cleveland, OH. Both organization credited the idea with potential for success but did not award any funding to give the idea the seed capital needed to start the service.

I still believe that it’s possible that the franchise could possibly work but I recognize that the only surviving players in the solid waste industry are multi-billion dollar corporation with union contracts providing service to communities across the country. It’s important that we make our best effort to be responsible for the waste that we produce so I am continuing to examine this idea and spread awareness. Realistically, there is no way for any startup solid waste company to compete with the giants that are dominating the industry, unless it’s both extraordinarily innovative and well funded.