Mara Gordon | Getting green for going green

Every week, my roommates and I start out with the best of intentions.

We place our bottles and cans neatly in our bin marked "recycling," ready to make the world a little greener come next trash day.

Then, the bin starts to overflow. By the end of the weekend, our kitchen is filthy and somebody takes out some of the bottles with the trash. A few more go into our building's communal recycling bin, along with all the other decidedly non-recyclable stuff other people have thrown in there.

When trash day arrives, one of my roommates eventually remembers to take out our bin. Some days, the recycling disappears with the trash. Others, it's picked up after the garbage trucks come to our street. Most of the time it's just left there until one of us decides to bring it in. And the cycle begins again.

I'm sure if we were a little more dedicated, we could find a way to recycle. We would wash out all our cans and bring them to bins on campus or bring them straight to the citywide recycling center.

But we aren't that dedicated. We're a bunch of lazy college students who want to do good but don't want to try very hard.

And with curbside recycling you shouldn't have to be anything more than that.

Philadelphia, unfortunately, has managed to make this simple thing very, very difficult for the hundreds of Penn students who live off-campus.

Other cities give recycling bins directly to residents, while in West Philadelphia, we have to go out of our way to the University City District office to pick one up. Right there is the city's first incorrect assumption: that people care enough about recycling to lug a big blue bin back to their homes.

To their credit, the Penn Environmental Group has worked hard this past semester to distribute recycling bins to students who don't live in University housing.

But even for the most diehard of activists, curbside recycling in Philadelphia is a challenge. That's because city officials only pick it up every other week, so it's easy to lose track of the schedule. And during those two weeks, a lot of garbage finds its way into recycling bins, meaning the city just throws the whole thing in the dump rather than pick out cans and bottles.

So what's a vaguely environmentalist Penn kid to do?

The solution may lie in an innovative organization called RecycleBank, which gives people very real incentives to take that extra step and recycle.

The Philadelphia-based company understands that most people aren't willing to go above and beyond their daily routines just to make sure their Diet Cokes don't head to a landfill. So RecycleBank makes it worth your while by rewarding your recycling with deals at local stores.

City governments contract with RecycleBank to provide residents with special recycling bins, each embedded with chips that hold their names and account information. Collection trucks then weigh the bins and customers are rewarded with "RecycleBank Dollars" based on how much they recycle.

Sounds cheesy, maybe, but those RecycleBank Dollars are actually worth something. You can use them at Starbucks, at Whole Foods or a host of other stores. Most households only earn about eight RecycleBank Dollars a week, but that's three Frappuccinos right there - just for something you probably try to do anyway.

And it works. In Wilmington, De., where the city government has distributed RecycleBank bins to every single home, residents recycled 35 percent of all household waste, according to RecycleBank Chief Operations Officer Scott Lamb. Before RecycleBank, the city had a grand total of zero curbside recycling programs.

In Philadelphia, on the other hand, we recycle about 4 percent of household waste.

For some reason, Philadelphia city officials have been resistant to the program. It does require a substantial investment to get off the ground, but the city's own comptroller estimated that if the city government contracted with RecycleBank, we could save about $15 million each year in costs associated with garbage disposal.

"The previous [mayoral] administration . did not make recycling a priority" in Philadelphia, Lamb said. But "we're not abandoning it. We want to make it happen."

So there's just one missing piece if RecycleBank is going to become a Philadelphia success story: you. To get Mayor Michael Nutter's administration to pay attention, it will take support from people who understand how important recycling is - and how important free Frappuccinos are, too.

Mara Gordon is a College senior from Washington, DC. Her e-mail is gordon@dailypennsylvanian.com. Flash Gordon appears Wednesdays.

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