New tool helps cities of Buffalo and Cincinnati realize greater recycling rates

Zerocycle, Washington, announced March 28 that the company has concluded two successful initiatives with the city of Buffalo, New York, and the city of Cincinnati, respectively. Zerocycle is the creator of a proprietary Resident Engagement Platform (REP) that uses analytics and behavioral science techniques to help local governments increase recycling, reduce waste and lower disposal costs.

Zerocycle’s Resident Engagement Platform uses proprietary big data analytics to capture and integrate a multitude of existing data streams, such as weight tickets and route information, to deliver targeted messaging to households in strategic areas based on their need for improvement. The outreach is customized with each city’s branding and features full-color maps, neighborhood rankings to foster friendly competition and other recycling insights.

Zerocycle’s initiative with the city of Buffalo helped double the rate of increase in recycling tonnage across target households, while the initiative with the city of Cincinnati led to a 15.7 percent increase in recycling participation. Both initiatives focused on neighborhoods with historically low recycling rates, and the results were measured using randomized controlled trials.

Officials from the city of Buffalo have extended their engagement with Zerocycle and expanded the number of target households by 400 percent.

“The city of Buffalo is pleased to have this new tool for our residents to motivate them to increase recycling in their neighborhoods,” Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown said.

“We’re very excited about our progress coming out of 2017, as we’ve now refined our measurement and outreach platform to extremely accurate levels, which would have been impossible without the real-world implementation and evaluation in these two great cities,” Hunter Hayes, Zerocycle’s co-founder and CEO, said. “In the first three months of 2018, we’ve already quintupled our 2017 data collection, and we don’t see any signs of that slowing down.”

Last year, Zerocycle helped the city of Fremont, California, achieve a 13 percent reduction in overall trash bin weight, and the company is preparing to launch new initiatives in Columbus, Ohio; Torrance, California; and Des Moines, Iowa, respectively.

In a separate announcement, Zerocycle recently launched a new web-based tool called the Recycling Analytics Dashboard (RAD), which visually displays a city’s neighborhood-specific waste diversion metrics. In addition to keeping citizens informed and engaged, RAD helps city officials proactively identify areas that are exceeding, meeting or falling below waste diversion targets.