Our
mission
Empower and encourage communities to preserve the environment by learning to recycle correctly.
What We Do
We’ve been taught to recycle. Now it’s time to learn to recycle correctly.
For decades, we have been told to reuse, reduce, and recycle to divert waste from landfill or incineration. So, we have. Yet, local recycling programs are in crisis. Recycling used to be less costly for local governments than disposal, but now costs are up to 5X higher. This is because contamination, which refers to all the things people put in their recycling bin that don’t belong. Contamination rates can be as high as 40% in municipalities across North America, threatening the continuation of local recycling programs.
The Recycle Coach app is an integral part of a complete recycling education platform focused on engaging entire communities to become more knowledgeable about recycling. Through the efforts of residents, businesses and local government, people come together to create a grass roots movement of sustainability within their community.
Our Story
Creighton Hooper founded Recycle Coach in 2001 as a recycling calendar company. Then, as now, municipalities had little extra money for education, so we focused on ‘doing more with less’ – a phrase that was less common back then! Our first two clients were the cities of Windsor and London, not far from our hometown of Toronto. As a sign of the importance we place on relationships, these two cities remain clients today.
As the potential of new communication technologies became apparent, in 2010 we launched the world’s first mobile app for local recycling programs. Today our technology is used in thousands of municipalities by millions of people.