CitéGreen gives brownie points to the best waste sorters

Environment | No comments

par Elsa Sidawy | 09.28.11

Are city dwellers not prone to saving the planet? “We realise that only 3% of the population is responsive to prevention talk,” Emmanuel Touboul, one of the three founders of CitéGreen (created last June to raise eco-citizens’ awareness), notices. The principle is to reward the most virtuous actions: dumping one’s dangerous waste in waste reception centres, encouraging car sharing or car-pooling to get around, choosing a provider that promotes renewable energy sources or even sorting one’s packaging materials better. Via an online platform that will be publicly beta tested by November, consumers will automatically score points, which they will be able to exchange for video on demand, fair-trade clothes or organic products provided by affiliated partners, and eventually benefit from cultural or sports services in their city. Enough to increase their yearly buying power on green products and services up to 600 Euros, the entrepreneur promises.

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Reversing the principle of incentive tax
Soleillos, greenpoints… CitéGreen is not the first start-up to come up with this point system. Its trademark is: tackling waste sorting – a real pain for local authorities – and rewarding good practices rather than acts of buying. The start-up suggests local authorities to fit citizens’ recycling bins with chips in order to be able to relate the weight of the collected waste to an address – therefore to a user account – when weighing the bins. The heavier the weight of the recycling bin, the more points the consumer will score. This principle precisely recalls that of the incentive tax, made compulsory by the French Environment Round Table, already tested by a few French towns. Except that, instead of making people pay for their excess waste, the best waste sorters get rewarded. Swapping sticks for carrots? “The lure of profit to raise people’s awareness is a bit cynical but it is an incentive leverage that works.” CitéGreen’s first targets are great urban areas, “which are less virtuous in terms of waste sorting,” but – as our bins are heavy – that is no small task. Local authorities’ room for manoeuvre in terms of waste management is limited by collection markets, which change every two to five years. Some cities might thus want to wait for the launching of the incentive tax on their land in order to couple it with CitéGreen’s complementary offer. The second difficulty that has to be removed is: rewarding waste sorting in collective housing can prove indescribably complex as bad sorters can take advantage of the system but CitéGreen’s managing director considers, on the contrary, that “this system generates emulation in buildings and, in the end, inhabitants’ keen interest improves sorting performances.”

The model: RecycleBank
Young French entrepreneurs have drawn their inspiration from the success of the American company RecycleBank, which claims no less than three million household subscribers in its country of origin and made a spectacular entry in the United Kingdom. A 70% penetration rate and sorting performances that can treble within a year: that is enough to reassure partners and local authorities. CitéGreen promises a rapid increase in the number of collected packaging materials to those who will pay for the service depending on the achieved objectives.
CitéGreen modestly banks on 200,000 subscribers by the end of 2012, starting with Paris and adjacent cities, which are in the running to test the service. It remains to be proven that French people are as responsive as Anglo-Saxons to incentive talk.