New Recycling Machine Offers Easy Refunds, Bragging Rights

Meet Zoe. She’s over six feet tall, about five feet wide, and spends all of her time near the stairs in the first floor of W20. She’s also MIT’s newest–and smartest–recycling machine. Part of a pilot program sponsored by MIT’s Facilities Department, Zoe is a sort of “reverse vending machine” that aims to make recycling easier, cleaner, and more efficient.

Created by Greenbean Recycling, a Somerville-based startup that was a 2010 MassChallenge finalist, the machine allows students to use their phone number as a login and tabulates their real-time energy savings impact. Utilizing an energy-efficient sorting process, it makes retrieving bottle deposits an instant process by electronically depositing refunds into a student’s TechCash or PayPal account, or it can be donated to a charity or MIT education program.

From CNN’s What’sNext blog:

A bar-code reader in the machine counts the number of cans, bottles, and the like that the person has dropped off—and then uploads that data to Greenbean’s website.

Recyclers can track their progress online and even engage in competitions with fellow students.

Competitions between fraternities at MIT have been particularly fruitful, [CEO Shanker Sahai] said, with the houses trying to compete against each other to get the top spot on an online recycling leaderboard.

Since the end of July, MIT has recycled 15,024 containers to date, saving 2779 kilowatts of energy. Among the MIT community, the Facility Department’s John Hames has dominated the competition with 1,505 recycled items. Zoe-like machines are planned for Tufts, Northeastern, Brandeis, and Holy Cross during the next semester, allowing the colleges to compete against each other for eco-bragging rights and, eventually, sponsored prizes like sports tickets and gift cards.