ReCollect Systems: A Simple, Cost-Effective Solution for Waste Management

According to a World Bank report, the world’s cities generated 2.01 billion tons of solid waste in 2016, amounting to a footprint of 0.74 kilograms per person per day. With the rapid growth in population and urbanization, annual waste generation is expected to increase by 70 percent to 3.40 billion tons by 2050. This fact struck a chord with David Eaves, one of ReCollect’s co-founders, who set his company in motion with the vision to make all aspects of waste disposal and recycling easier for citizens to understand. As a result, ReCollect has a simple mission: increase recycling, help the planet and make people’s lives easier by enabling them to comply with their city’s rules surrounding waste disposal.

ReCollect’s story began way back in 2009 when Eaves was advising the newly elected Mayor of Vancouver about technology. Eaves helped the city rethink its strategy around data and transparency, making Vancouver the second major city in the world to establish an open data governance system. Eaves performed a major portion of the policy work and advocacy to convince the mayor of the significance of such a system. One evening while Eaves thought about how to explain to citizens why open data is interesting, he reflected on Vancouver’s relatively complicated garbage schedule. Eaves wrote a blog post about how some simple tools could help address this issue. The idea caught the attention of two Silicon Valley software developers who had seen Eaves speak at several conferences. The duo was organizing a hackathon, and agreed to build a waste app as their hackathon project, releasing an alpha version based on Eaves’s blog post. The three soon met up and ended up running the application as a community project for a few years. Citizens responded well to the app as the team received great feedback for their work. The group subsequently decided to launch it as a service. And today, after garnering a vast client base, ReCollect’s footprint comprises 40-50 million citizens.

Over the years both ReCollect and its product offerings have grown. Today the company has a number of tools that enable governments and companies to communicate with their users about a multitude of issues around solid waste. As part of this ecosystem of products, ReCollect offers an easy-to-use city waste management app in multiple languages, which helps reduce the volume of calls to governments’ help desks.

ReCollect Systems is laser-focused on helping cities improve the way they communicate with residents about waste in addition to achieving their goals around waste reduction and recycling

The value that this imparts being the enormous boon to the city officials and citizens alike, receiving a timely and more comprehensive solution to their waste management woes. In addition, ReCollect’s tools help ensure greater compliance with rules, increasing operation efficiency of its clients. But most importantly to ReCollect’s founders are the two facts that its tools help residents be more effective recyclers, all while getting rave reviews from end users about how easy it is to use.

This aligns nicely with the company’s aim to alter the behavior of citizens and enable them to do the right thing for the environment (with regard to waste disposal). ReCollect’s solution makes all the information relevant to solid waste management easily available to residents, while increasing the standards of excellence in recycling. The company has created an exceptional level of operational efficiency inside governmental organizations, to help employees assist residents in accessing pertinent data and reducing the burden on the government.

ReCollect’s cost-effective, easy-to-use solution is used by millions of residents across various cities and counties. The smallest municipal client is 9,000 people strong, and the largest has a population of over 2.1 million. ReCollect is already used by over 500 jurisdictions that include over 70 million people across North America, and the company looks forward to helping its clients launch new programs focused on waste management. They are laser-focused on helping cities improve the way they communicate with residents about waste in addition to achieving their goals around waste reduction and recycling. ReCollect has new tools in development aimed at enabling the solid waste departments to do their job more effectively, moving away from manual processes, and adopting a more connected and advanced solution.