The Recycling Partnership Teams Up With The Coca-Cola Foundation For Three-Year $4 million Program To Decrease Waste In Atlanta

March 14, 2019 12:54 PM EDT

FALLS CHURCH, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Recycling Partnership with support from The Coca-Cola Foundation is launching a three-year $4 million-dollar program that will improve access to recycling, and dramatically increase the capture of more quality recyclable items in the City of Atlanta.

“The City of Atlanta is eager to work with partners like The Recycling Partnership to design a more sustainable future for our community and our country, and we appreciate The Coca-Cola Foundation’s support as well,” says Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. “Given the growing problem of packaging waste, it’s critical that Atlanta design a more efficient recycling system to keep as many of those materials as we can out of the landfill and back in the recycling stream. I hope this new partnership and program will allow our city to stake out a leadership position on recycling that can serve as inspiration and a model for other communities throughout the country that are looking to address similar challenges and drive long-term recycling system change.”

The anchor of the new city-wide recycling program is the Partnership’s “Feet on the Street” cart tagging education campaign, which was successfully piloted in select areas within the City of Atlanta in 2017.

“Every home has the power to keep 800 pounds of recyclables out of the landfill every year,” says Cody Marshall, Chief Community Strategy Officer of The Recycling Partnership. “By educating Atlanta residents at the cart with easy-to-understand what and what not to recycle tags, we are driving positive behavior change to help the City of Atlanta capture more quality recyclables. These quality recyclables are then put back into the recycling system stream, creating a healthier economy, a less wasteful planet and stronger communities.”

“We saw a 57% decrease in overall contamination and 27% increase in overall capture of quality recyclables in 2017 with the Partnership model,” says Kanika Greenlee, Executive Director of Keep Atlanta Beautiful Commission. “City of Atlanta residents want to recycle and to recycle correctly. We will drive powerful recycling change throughout our entire city with this innovative model.”

“There’s no better place to support a recycling movement than in our hometown of Atlanta,” says Helen Smith Price, President of The Coca-Cola Foundation. “Through The Recycling Partnership’s proven recycling education model, we hope to help Atlanta become a city without packaging waste.”

In addition to focusing on single-family home recycling in Atlanta, The Partnership will also launch new programs targeted at improving recycling access and education at multi-family housing locations and campuses of local colleges and universities throughout the city.

Learn more about the Partnership’s successful pilot program reducing contamination in Atlanta at https://recyclingpartnership.org/for-communities/

About The Recycling Partnership

The Recycling Partnership (recyclingpartnership.org) is a national nonprofit organization that leverages corporate partner funding to transform recycling for good in states, cities and communities all across America. As the only organization in the country that engages the full recycling supply chain from the corporations that manufacture products and packaging to local governments charged with recycling to industry end markets, haulers, material recovery facilities, and converters; The Recycling Partnership positively impacts recycling at every step in the process. The Recycling Partnership has served more than 1,000 communities and counting with best-in-class tools, data, resources and technical support, helped place 500,000 recycling carts, reached 50 million households, and helped companies and communities invest more than $37 million in recycling infrastructure. In doing so, The Recycling Partnership has created meaningful social, environmental, and economic change. By the end of 2019, the nonprofit change agent estimates it will have diverted 230 million pounds of new recyclables, saved 465 million gallons of water, avoided 250 thousand metric tons of GHG, and driven significant reductions in targeted contamination rates.

About The Coca-Cola Foundation

The Coca-Cola Foundation is the global philanthropic arm of The Coca-Cola Company. Since its inception in 1984, the Foundation has awarded more than $1 billion in grants to support sustainable community initiatives around the world. For more information about The Coca-Cola Foundation, please visit www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/the-coca-cola-foundation.