Zerocycle the creator of a proprietary Resident Engagement Platform (REP) that uses rich data analytics and behavioral science techniques to help local governments increase recycling, reduce waste and lower disposal costs, has concluded two highly successful initiatives with the City of Buffalo, NY, and the City of Cincinnati, OH, respectively.
According to Zerocycle the Resident Engagement Platform is an industry-first solution that uses proprietary big data analytics to capture and integrate a multitude of existing data streams such as weight tickets and route information, in order to deliver targeted messaging to households in strategic areas based ontheir 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 insights onrecycling.
Zerocycle’s initiative with the City of Buffalo doubled the rate of increase in recycling tonnage across target households, while the initiative with the City of Cincinnati led to a 15.7% increase in recycling participation, the company says. Both initiatives focused onneighborhoods with historically low recycling rates, and the results were measured using randomized controlled trials.
Officials from the City of Buffalo were – according to the company – so impressed with the results that they have extended their engagement with Zerocycle, and expanded the number of target households by 400 percent. Commented Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown: “The City of Buffalo is pleased to have this new tool for our residents to motivate them to increase recycling in their neighborhoods.”
“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,” commented Hunter Hayes, Zerocycle’s Co-Founder and CEO. “In the first three months of 2018we’ve already quintupled our 2017data collection, and we don’t see any signs of that slowing down.”
Last year, Zerocycle helped the City of Fremont, CA achieve a 13% reduction in overall trash bin weight and the company is preparing to launch new initiatives in Columbus, OH, Torrance, CA, and Des Moines, IA, respectively.
In a separate but related announcement Zerocycle recently launched an innovative 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.
