Don't you love having fun while feeling like you did a good deed for yourself and the world? That's what I love about the promotional program called Recyclebank! It's a program that matches consumers with businesses (good old capitalism at work) while motivating everyone to use curbside recycling (green that we can all buy into).
It was an easy sell for our household because long before we had curbside recycling, long before the extra duties involved with having children, we already recycled. We dutifully sorted plastics and papers and cans, hauling them on our weekly shopping trip to large bins outside a grocery store. Nobody offered us any rewards, but we did it anyway. Maybe you did, too.When the Recyclebank program came to our neighborhood, it was hard to believe that we could just throw all of our clean recyclables into one bin with no sorting. Our one exception is the polystyrene that we still have to take to a separate recycling center. Overall, it really couldn't get any easier to keep all of that garbage out of the landfill.
It's my understanding that what you pay for the curbside Recyclebank program depends on whether you have to sign up separately or if your municipality has made its own collective deal (which probably costs you less). In our case, the few extra dollars per month that it costs comes back in the form of coupons and freebies. That's supposed to be the fun part. You not only earn points by recycling, but by looking at certain advertising promotions on the site. I recently perused a "green schools" promotion that mixed educational messages with ads and earned more than 100 extra points toward coupons.
I just ordered my third free edition of a free magazine (I'll recycle them eventually). I've received free grocery shopping bags, free cleaning supplies and a few samples of free food. Mostly I've received coupons for $5 or $10 off at the checkout line of a healthy grocery store.
The reality is that even if we all recycled more today, we still wouldn't solve all of our world's environmental problems. Much larger, industrial-scale issues still need addressing. In the meantime as individuals, we can all practice conscious consumerism that goes beyond recycling, beyond less packaging, and to deeper questions about what and why we buy in the first place.
For now, I thought I'd try adding the Recyclebank button to my site, in case any of you haven't yet signed up for the rewards program and want to share a few points with me in the process. I'm not trying to encourage you to buy anything you wouldn't otherwise buy; you know I'm not a huge fan of couponing in general. Since I am looking for ecologically responsible ways to monetize my site (code for earning a little college tuition for my children while writing about subjects I'm passionate about), I'm hoping that that you're okay with that. Thanks for recycling with me.