That was the message from bin weighing specialists PM Onboard last week, as the Bradford-based company held an open day Kempton Park racecourse in Surrey.
 PM Onboard's open day at the Kempton Park race course showed how on-board weighing equipment might be used to arrange householder incentives on recycling |
Speaking to letsrecycle.com, marketing manager Mark Bottomley said that running good awareness campaigns will not be sufficient alone to reach high recycling rates.
Mr Bottomley said: “Great marketing campaigns may be successful, but they are never going to achieve more than a 50% recycling rate. You only need to look at the US for evidence of this.”
PM Onboard makes equipment that councils can use to assess which households are producing more waste, including the Bin Weigh system. The company has provided equipment to help with a number of incentive schemes run in Europe.
“In Holland, recycling incentive systems have encouraged householders to recycle more. The schemes work by councils providing services, such as car parking or access to leisure facilities, for free, in return for significantly increasing the kilograms they recycle,” Mr Bottomley said.
” Great marketing campaigns may be successful, but they are never going to achieve more than a 50% recycling rate.“
– Mark Bottomley, PM Onboard
New software
Next week PM Onboard will bring a new element into their weighing software, which will enable councils to score households on the amount of waste they are recycling, compared to what is going into their residual bin.
Mr Bottomley said the company had already received some interest from councils which were interested in tallying residents' recycling levels over a designated period of time in order to reward those performing well.
Gemma Scott, senior recycling officer at Camden council said the London borough was about to put weighing systems in place, and was considering a possible incentive scheme. “I think this is something councils will definitely be looking at,” she said.
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