This was one of those ideas that made me wonder why I hadn’t thought of it. You have machines to sell aluminum cans of soda and plastic bottles of water, so why not offer the same convenience for recycling your empties and getting any deposit back? Turns out a Norwegian-based company called TOMRA is all over it. (The original technology was developed in 1972, and TOMRA has had an interesting ride over the last 30 years, including battling slumps in both the market and the price of scrap aluminum, but I digress)
The news that really caught my eye was a MediaPost headline: New Out-of-Home Ad Space: Recycling Machines. Each TOMRA recycling kiosk will soon have the opportunity to be a street-level billboard. Of course, Pepsi and Coke have been doing this for years. But as the containers put INTO the machine can be of any brand, the branding of the machines themselves is wide open. Advertisers can associate their brands with the goodwill and positive associations of recycling and at the same time help fund its progress. Now, the example shown in the article seemed a little tame, so I thought I’d try a few of my own, below. (All done completely without permission, of course. All logos are registered trademarks of their owners, blah-de-blah-de-blah) So enjoy them before corporate lawyers lock me up.
In any case, it’s nice to see that recycling CAN pay… in more ways than one.