This Company is Ready to Take All Your Plastic Trash Away and They'll Reward You for It

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The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

Here’s an idea. What if you could earn rewards at your local store or gas station by recycling more of your plastic in a simple-as-can-be system that would help the environment in the process?

Right now, there aren’t too many incentives other than personal goodwill to recycle. And, with so little plastic actually making it into the recycling process amid continuing problems of access, it isn’t surprising that so much trash instead gets discarded to fill up landfills and oceans.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), less than 9% of plastic in the country ends up being recycled. Much of that paltry figure lies at the feet of access and problems with sorting; many people simply don’t have convenient access to traditional recycling services.

And, even when they do, less than half of the eligible material makes it into the recycling process due to confusion about what should or shouldn't go in the bin, according to startup newBin.

The Erie, Pennsylvania-based disruptor, a sister company to International Recycling Group (IRG), wants to change all that, and it wants you to earn rewards in the process.

Trust the Process

By simply donating their unsorted plastic waste, households can earn points for discounts at local stores, gas stations, and other retailers. The app-based system allows you, the so-called Binnie, to schedule a pickup and then a company contractor — what newBin calls a Binner — will come and pick it up with no sorting and without you having to leave your doorstep.

Think of the Binners as recycling industry equivalents to Uber Technologies Inc. UBER or Lyft Inc. LYFT drivers. They just pick up recyclable trash as opposed to passengers and deliver it via an app to the required destination. NewBin will do the sorting and will guarantee your waste plastic gets into the hands of real recyclers, and not a landfill or the ocean.

The Binnie earns rewards, as do the Binners — as well as a feeling of doing the right thing — while newBin takes another step in securing its aim of increasing the volume of plastic to be recycled.

By making the system much more convenient, the company believes it can make real inroads into improving the poor ratio of converting plastic into recycled material. It is aiming to reduce landfill or incineration of plastics by 1 billion pounds per year in the next 7 years by doing so.

What’s in it for Them?

In turn, the company reports it will make money through marketing and service fees generated by the rewards system. NewBin will also charge commercial and institutional customers for their waste collection-guaranteeing fast-food chains like McDonald's Corporation MCD, Starbucks Corporation SBUX, and KFC, a subsidiary of Yum! Brands YUM- a more sustainable solution for their in-store plastic waste. newBin will generate further revenue by charging tipping fees to municipalities based on savings versus traditional curbside collection fees. 

NewBin is the brainchild of IRG Founder and Chairman Mitch Hecht, a former Wall Street professional and steel industry executive. At the same time he and his team are developing the newBin concept, IRG is planning to build a hyper-scale plastics recovery facility in Erie that will sort all the plastics from newBin at lightning speed and at much lower cost.

The $150 million facility is expected to come online in 2023 and is projected to process about 500 million pounds of material annually.

While newBin is expected within 3 years of that date to supply all the plastic material for processing, existing materials recovery facilities (MRFs) will supply baled plastic to the plant in the interim. MRFs in the country are operated by major waste processors such as Waste Management Inc. WM, Republic Services Inc. RSG and GFL Environmental Inc GFL.

More details on newBin’s plans or how you can invest in the company can be found here.

The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.