Even in this enlightened age of recycling, a majority of all bottles and cans end up in landfills.
More than 200 billion beverage containers are sold each year in the U.S., says the nonprofit Container Recycling Institute, but fewer than 75 billion are recycled.
That isn’t just bad for the environment — it’s money left on the table.
The states keep unreturned deposits, and those nickels and dimes add up: New York alone netted $150 million last year writes Fortune Small Business.
That’s a golden opportunity for Clynk, a startup in Scarborough, Maine. Clynk’s patent-pending system scans bar codes on bottles and cans so it can return each kind to its maker. In Maine manufacturers must pay Clynk a 35 cent fee per container.
So far the company’s annual revenues are little more than $1 million. But CEO Frank Whittier says his timing is great — especially since New York, Connecticut and Oregon started offering deposits on water bottles this year. (Only six states do so.)
“This culture is starting to wake up to the fact that you can’t just throw away 50 billion water containers every year,” Whittier says.
Photo by Fortune Small Business.
