Most of us have good intentions when trying to recycle items, but the reality is, it can be overwhelming. It can be hard to understand which items we should trash, recycle, or donate—but thanks to a new app, the
Isabella County Material Recovery Facility is taking the guesswork out of recycling for Mt. Pleasant residents.
Recycle Coach is a free app from a technology company that offers a digital solution optimizing waste, collection, and recycling programs in public and private management waste services. The app connects residents with local disposal information, resources, and nearby drop-off locations in over 3,000 communities across the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The app is now offered in Isabella County.
Located at 4208 E. River Road in Mt. Pleasant, the Isabella County Material Recovery Facility aims to promote the responsibility and principles of stewardship throughout the area. In recycling, residents are able to give something back to the environment for future generations, help provide local jobs, save energy, and conserve valuable natural resources.
Charity Sweet, operations supervisor for the Isabella County Material Recovery Facility, says the new app will transform how they communicate with residents on local collection, waste, and recycling information.
She first heard about the app at a booth set up at the Michigan Recycling Conference a year or two ago.
“It was brought to our attention when we started discussing some things that we could do better to educate the residents of Isabella County to help guide them better in their recycling efforts,” she says. “We reached out to Recycle Coach, they gave us a presentation, and we liked what we heard.”
After Sweet led a presentation at a sustainability conference, the Isabella County Material Recovery Facility received a $10,000 award for best pitch. This award amount will cover the first year and part of the second year of the three-year contract with Recycle Coach.
The app is free of charge for Isabella County residents, and is available for download on the
Google Play Store or iPhone
App Store. Within the app, users can take a photo of the item they wish to discard, and the app will bring up a dropdown menu of possible items shown in the photo. Then users can select the correct item description, and will be notified if the item can be donated, trashed, or recycled.
There are also local recycling schedules, special events for specific items such as tires or household hazardous waste collections within the app.
“There are also little educational pieces and questions within the app,” Sweet says. ‘You can ask if you can recycle balloons for example, or go through and play these little games on the app to help educate and help curb some of the ‘wishcycling.’ Unfortunately, we get a lot of trash that’s mixed in with recycling, which unfortunately ends up going in the trash.”
Sweet says one popular item that the facility gets frequently, but cannot be recycled there, is plastic bags. These bags unfortunately get trapped in the system, wrapped up in lines or wheels. Additionally, other materials like styrofoam or waxboard aren’t accepted in the curbside pickup containers, but can be dropped off directly at the facility. The facility also accepts metal, paper, cardboard, plastic jugs, and bottles.
When folks are looking to get rid of items like furniture, the app can suggest local donation spots such as the Habitat for Humanity, Salvation Army, or Goodwill.
Sweet worked hard on the backend of this app, inputting local destinations and locations to make the process easier for the user.
“We tried to add as many hyperlinks as we could so that it would take them right to the website of these places, to try to help as much as possible,” she says. “This is all new to us, and I’m not perfect, so if there is information that’s in there that somebody catches, they do have the ability to go on and give us some feedback. They can let us know if they found something that doesn’t look right so we can go back in and correct it. That feedback is just going to help us move forward.”
App users can be notified with real-time updates on service disruptions, receive collection reminders, and use problem-reporting tools to notify municipal customer services.
Sweet hopes the app can make everyone be better recyclers, and can help cut down on some of the residual items within the stream that can’t be recycled.