WHY I AM INTERESTED
Recycling is the right thing to do, and most builders I know want to do it. I’m also interested because waste is costly, and recycling relieves these pressures. Nothing drives me crazier than a dumpster filled with non-broken down cubical cardboard boxes, masonry fill and metal. All is easily recycled, and costly as waste. Most of us are in the market for solutions. One of the biggest barriers to recycling is the fragmented market of receivers – dozens if not hundreds of separate and uncoordinated collectors, with no clear source or references to call upon.
WHAT IT DOES
From iTunes: Quickly find recycling locations nearby that accept items you pick from a list. The free app lets you organize locations by adding them to your Recycling List. We’ve taken the pain out of recycling by making it straight forward to find recyclers with the least amount of trips.
MyRecycleList is the application tool of the 1800Recycling.com, a for-profit recycling service and information provider currently in beta. The app breaks down prospective recycling into nine categories: plastics, electronics, paper, glass, metal, household, automotive, yard and hazardous. Each of these categories breaks down into roughly ten sub-categories. Plastics, for example, have categories for packing peanuts, each plastics #1, 2 (clear), 2 (color) 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, shopping bags, other and interestingly, gift cards (for some reason Best Buy is the only one who accepts the latter).
The app gives detailed lists of what receivers will take, their contact information, and while its integration with the Google maps is a good idea, it is a shame that they use the clunky safari version over the iPhone specific Maps app. It does integrate well with the contacts feature, which is nice if you wish to save a receiver’s info. If you wish to add a receiver to your contacts, it’s a button touch away.
You can also create a custom quick reference list of the receivers you are most likely to use.
It links to the 1800Recycling website, and allows you to sign up for the Recycling Newsletter.
HOW WELL IT DOES IT
All in all, this app has some of the right ideas, but simply doesn’t go far enough. To be fair, the company has an ambitious mission, and they are in beta: Pricing information is not available, which would be a huge plus in future versions. It is lacking many of recycling receivers I am aware of, so there is a serious content deficiency. This is a common problem on free apps. I personally knew of half a dozen metal recycling receivers, as well as a specialized vinyl & wood receiver. None were listed. There is no category for builder’s #1 material: wood, even though I know of a local private dump that will separate dumpster material and grind wood for mulch.
Further, it appears the application relies on crowd-sourcing to suggest materials and suppliers. That’s cheap and difficult to do, particularly in a fragmented market. You cannot suggest a supplier through the iPhone app, but you can online. It will take time to get all the suppliers in there, and an even more colossal effort to keep them up to date. We had a similar list of 50+ receivers offered by our city government, but when our company got around to confirming who took what, we found nearly half of them to be no longer in business.
PROS: A necessary application with transformative potential in the future. When it does have a receiver listed, there is good detailed information and integration with communication tools.
CONS: Content is lacking and many receivers are not on the list. It is not builder specific, so you have to sort through lots of information you don’t need.
CONCLUSION: There is a definite need for this. Builders have more material to recycle than every non-industrial business, but are always short on time and money. Any tool that gives direct information on who takes what, how to contact them and where they are located is useful. This is the sort of tool that could morph into a recycling pick-up service (the ultimate solution for builders), where builders could post what they have available and the service could pick up and sort themselves. The 1800Recycling web site now specifies if a receiver picks up or not, which is a start. They are actively looking for local partners. Because of the challenges associated with non-professionals sorting material, this single-stream recycling is the direction most residential service is heading. Construction may head there too. Still, builders generate mass materials that residential service does not take; metals and packing styrofoam come to mind. It would be nice to have a builder specific recycling app. I expect there would be enough demand to support it. This app gets a lot of the ideas right, but it is short on content you’d hope it would deliver. Because of those content deficiencies it may be useful, maybe not.
SCORE 65|100
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Smart app amazing!!!