By Geoffrey Wertime, Staff Writer
FLORENCE — The township will soon be part of a new recycling program aimed at increasing the municipality’s recycling rate and benefiting residents financially.
Florence is one of five townships in the county set to join the RecycleBank program, which tracks how much residents and towns participate and assigns reward points based on that amount.
“In the past, recycling had to stand on the merits of being environmentally responsible,” said Assistant Township Administrator Thomas Sahol. “Now the municipality has an enticement. We can say, ‘You will actually get not just satisfaction… The more you recycle the better your benefit financially.’”
The township will send letters out to eligible residents Feb. 24, Mr. Sahol said, and RecycleBank will then begin labeling participating households’ containers while they are set out for collection.
The Burlington County Board of Chosen Freeholders is sponsoring the paper cart program, funding 50 percent of the cost of carts used in the program and loaning towns the other half of the money, which municipalities can pay back over several years. A radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tag tracks the amount recycled by weight.
For every year of operation, each fitted container costs the township $7.20.
Only about 1,000 paper recycling containers in the township, those that are usable with automated trucks, will be included in this first wave of the program, Mr. Sahol said. That means the program will mostly affect properties east of Route 130, in what he called “the county portion of Florence Township.”
The more a household recycles, the more reward points it can earn and use at over 1,200 national program partners, such as Kraft Foods, CVS/pharmacy Coca-Cola and Target.com. RecycleBank is in the process of finding local partners as well, according to Mr. Sahol.
He said he hopes to see local participating businesses, which can register for free, get some exposure through the program and draw in some new business.
“I think in the long run they could see some new faces at their doorsteps,” he said.
While the program works only for mixed paper and cardboard recycling, Mr. Sahol said, the township has told the county it supports the growing move to co-mingle all recycling in one container. But even with just some of the recycling covered, he said, the program still benefits everyone in the township.
“It’s not just an opportunity for you; the municipality gets a direct benefit in seeing less material go to the landfill, which wastes space, and an increase in recycling,” he said.
“Hand in hand with that, you as a resident get a benefit, and the town gets a financial benefit if recycling numbers increases enough,” which he said could make the municipality eligible for recycling grants.
“The more tons diverted from the waste stream, the better off municipality is,” he said.

