Feature Story
Kansmacker Recycling
Can the private sector save us from our garbage?
By Robert Clarke
“People keep saying we’re on the right track, but we’re running out of oxygen,” admits Kansmacker Recycling’s Director of Operations.
Aaron Yono – heir to a proprietary, technology-driven system for crushing beverage containers that allows recyclers to collect large volumes of plastics and aluminum in relatively small spaces – has just launched his first three Reverse Vending Machines at three Massy Stores supermarkets in West Trinidad. It might seem strange then that he’s already “running out of oxygen,” but it took several years for Kansmacker to get to this point, and without a little help from the state and good corporate citizens, going further will be a slog.
Yono and his business partner Christopher Moses have been selling their recycling plan to waste management stakeholders for some time now, explaining that people won’t recycle their beverage containers unless
- it’s really convenient and
- the financial incentive is big enough.
Kansmacker can provide the convenience: Hundreds of compacting machines at supermarkets, gas stations and public buildings. But government will eventually have to step in with the incentive, by mandating refundable deposits for recyclable beverage containers. That would happen through a Beverage Container Bill, discussed for years but never enacted.
Yono has seen the gold standard of beverage container recycling up close. He’s from Michigan, USA where his father started Kansmacker Recycling and developed the first Reverse Vending Machines to service the state’s beverage container law, back in the 1970s. Michigan now sees 96% of its recyclable bottles and cans returned for recycling. That’s because there are collection points everywhere and the financial reward is just right – 10 U.S. cents for each container, about 10% of the average cost of a drink.
Other states in the U.S. have similar beverage container laws, but return rates are often much lower than Michigan’s due to insufficient collection points or because deposits are set too low. Barbados also has a beverage container law, but its return rate hovers around 30%. Kansmacker’s duo of Yono and Moses have offered to help with crafting a local beverage container law that would, in theory, generate a high return rate.
“There’s a big difference between just doing a bottle law for a win and doing it to be super-successful,” says Yono. “You don’t want to come halfway and put things in place and not have the incentive to really and truly incentivize people to make this behavioural change. We’re embarking on the impossible task of changing behaviour patterns, so with that comes an incredible amount of marketing and education and information and systems, and you have to make it easy for people so that they can do it repeatedly.”
Kansmacker has dubbed themselves “Point of Collection specialists”, but they believe that with the cooperation of the Solid Waste Management Company Ltd (SWMCOL), they can pioneer a national recycling system that would divert huge amounts of recyclable waste from overburdened landfills.
“Our country is choking on garbage,” says Christopher Moses, Kansmacker’s Director of New Business Development. “All of our landfills are maxed out to capacity.” Moses envisions a partnership with SWMCOL in which technology would, again, help to facilitate recycling.
In this vision, people would put potentially recyclable items in a separate garbage bag, which they’d tie with a ‘Single- Stream Recycling’ tag that they’d scan into their smart phones to claim reward points. The bags would be picked up by everyday garbage trucks and dropped off at Kansmacker Material Recovery Facilities at landfills for sorting, with the goal being to significantly reduce the amount of waste being dumped atop the mountains of garbage we’ve already produced. It’s ambitious, but for two men in their thirties who have been pondering the sector’s potential in T&T for years, a natural second step.
For the moment, however, it’s back to step one: Collecting as many beverage containers as they can at the three Massy Stores locations – West Mall, Alyce Glen, and Maraval – participating in a Kansmacker/Massy pilot project planned to expand to Massy Stores nationwide. “Since we launched as of July 9 when we installed the first machine at Massy West Mall,” says Moses, “we have had exactly what we anticipated, which was public endorsement, public acceptance, and finally a pipeline for people to easily recycle.” Containers collected by Kansmacker machines are taken to SWMCOL’s recycling facility.
Kansmacker knows that their system can go only so far without a law that mandates a system for consumers to pay deposits and claim refunds when they recycle. But they’re doing all they can with just the private sector, like Massy giving points for each recycled container. In the absence of a bottle law, they’re also developing a kanchange app that would provide rewards through a Kansmacker incentive programme.
Good corporate citizens, however, can help right now, by paying to advertise on Reverse Vending Machines (RVMs). The compacting hardware and data collection system contained in each Reverse Vending Machine (RVM) isn’t cheap. Kansmacker says that if companies paid to brand them, they could roll out many more.
“We need a big company to jump on board with us and say, let’s go, and they can look as good as we do,” says Yono at Kansmacker’s Woodbrook office. “And then they have a story to tell. They can say, ‘We diverted five million bottles from going in the landfill.’ So as far as corporate social responsibility goes, we’re right up the alley.”
You can reach Kansmacker through
kansmackerrecycling.com.
