Recycling kiosks: A futile exercise?

When many Western European governments introduced recycling laws, it didn't take long for kiosk manufacturers to take advantage of the situation. Several companies, including global companies like Wincor Nixdorf International, began developing recycling kiosks that pay consumers to toss certain types of refuse into specialized machines instead of traditional waste bins.

The move has proven a financial windfall for all involved — manufacturers, consumers and the government.

But in the United States, the market for such machines is, well, in the dumps.

In fact, Maryland-based kiosk consultant Francie Mendelsohn, president of Summit Research Associates, said she knows of no company in the country venturing into machines that can be used for recycling purposes. The reasons: little public demand and little projected profitability.

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"People in Europe have had a much longer history of being mindful of the environment and what we're doing to it. That's why they're thinking of this. We just throw everything out. We're just slower to get with the program."

Several American companies, including NCR and IBM, say they do not have recycling kiosk programs.

Europe leads the way

A decade ago, as governments across Western Europe tightened restrictions on public waste, representatives of Tomra Inc., a manufacturer of kiosks, watched with anticipation. It eventually changed its business model to solely focus on rolling out recycling kiosks.

Tomra has since produced thousands of machines that are in use throughout the United Kingdom and Japan. The company carved a niche through incentive programs that entice people to recycle.

"Incentives work. There's no doubt about that," said Aleksander Mortensen, Tomra's vice president of business development for Central and Eastern Europe. Rates of return "depend on the incentive, of course. If it's small, then the return is small. The point is to find the right kind of reward with low cost and high appeal."

Wincor Nixdorf is one of the global companies that manufacture a recycling kiosk.

Those payouts depend on the size and number of material placed in a machine. Tomra's products, like those of its competitors, process plastic and glass bottles.

When a consumer inserts a bottle into the machine, sensors inside the equipment scan the product's size and makeup. If it is plastic, the machine compacts it, flattening it down to a size no thicker than width of an adult finger. Glass bottles are pulverized and stored in the machine.

The compaction processes enable machines, depending on their size, to hold as many as 80,000 containers, Mortensen said. Breaking down the products also saves in transportation costs because haulers are able to cart off more product in a single load, he added.

Today, his company's machines collect tens of thousands of tons of waste every year.

U.S. still a possibility

Tomra, which produces between 3,000 and 6,000 kiosks annually, has worked in recent years to bring its machines to the United States. It has about 1,000 kiosks in operation in California and Michigan — states with bottle bills — that collect upward of 400 tons of recyclable material a year. And Tomra is teaming with Waste Management, one of the United States' largest waste collection firms, on a pilot program to test the feasibility of incentive machines.

"We see we have a business opportunity" in the United States, Mortensen said. "We would be happy to see that we could (spur) a lot of voluntary programs without bottle bills. … We have to find good partners and stakeholders and build projects on top of that."

There's hope among foreign manufacturers for turning trash into cash in the United States, but that optimism might be little more than wishful thinking, Mendelsohn said. Until Americans truly make recycling a widespread priority, she sees efforts by companies to set up kiosks around the United States as an exercise in fiscal futility.

Approximately 8,550 curbside recycling programs exist throughout the United States, a lower figure than the 8,875 programs that existed in 2003, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The country recycles 32.5 percent of its waste, a rate that has almost doubled during the past 15 years.

Mendelsohn said companies would have to put scores of machines to use and make them easily accessible for such a program to work. Otherwise, consumers will not see value in spending their time or gas money.

"It's a tough time to introduce (recycling machines), as noble an idea as it is," she said. "You've got to be realistic and prioritize what will sell. People talk about recycling, but it is not a priority to them."