Reflections On an Unlikely Partnership: Waste Management & Recyclebank

Dave Aardsma, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at Waste Management, shares his company’s latest challenge – and the opportunities it brings.

Thousands of ambitious MBA students, social entrepreneurs, and leaders in sustainability gathered in late October for the Net Impact Conference, an annual event started twenty years ago- before the concept of sustainability had gone mainstream. While the conference has grown from a dozen to nearly 2,700 participants, Net Impact continues to work to reduce the event's environmental footprint. This year, the conference was held at the Baltimore Convention Center, which runs on power from Waste Management's local waste-to-energy facility, while food waste is turned into fertilizer for the Convention Center's green roof and surrounding landscapes.

This year, I delivered a keynote with Jonathan Hsu, CEO of Recyclebank - a vast online community and incentive platform for recycling - and Marc Gunther, a writer and speaker specializing in business and sustainability issues (and Net Impact Board member). Our conversation focused on the power of partnerships, including the challenges and opportunities my own company experienced in bringing together Waste Management's huge curbside collection infrastructure - the largest in the nation - and Recyclebank.

As you might know, we invested in Recyclebank about a year ago to incentivize people to change how they consume and dispose of materials. The investment is helping to enhance our existing public sector relationships and signals our commitment to growing our customer base as we see more and more towns and cities make recycling a priority.

In our short time as partners, we've started initiating change to help people see the value in waste. This partnership is allowing us to scale up Recyclebank's efforts while giving us a competitive advantage. As Jonathan has said, we're running a marathon, not a sprint, and together we've scratched the surface of what we can achieve. We've since brought Recyclebank to 63 communities, recycled 86 million pounds of materials and distributed more than $2 million in Recyclebank rewards to members to use at local businesses and national retailers.

The transition from our own recycling program to a joint program with Recyclebank was not seamless. Before we could launch the partnership, we had to shut down our own recycling program and find a way to integrate it into Recyclebank. Our public sector group led this work, along with help from my team.

Another challenge has been converting our existing customers to Recyclebank as fast as possible. We have a small team of people at Waste Management who work on this initiative every day, and we plan to launch Recyclebank in many more communities.

It was so inspiring to be at the Net Impact Conference among such an enthusiastic crowd of current and future leaders who are thinking about the same sustainability issues I do every day. Sharing our own experiences when it comes to creative partnerships, and scaling up sustainability efforts, is what this event is all about. The discussions throughout the weekend reinforced the important role of business in creating a sustainable future, which in our case means providing customers innovative ways to be better environmental stewards-whether it be incentives for recycling through Recyclebank or conversion technologies that transform waste into fuel.

I feel reenergized by the weekend and excited to work with the next generation of leaders to continue building a brighter, greener future.