Official City of Coral Gables Notice
The Florida Beverage Association (FBA) is pleased to announce the City of Coral Gables and Keep Coral Gables Beautiful received the 2022 FBA Community Grant for their “Reverse Vending Machine Recycling
Incentive Program”.
In partnership with the American Beverage Foundation for a Healthy America, the $25,000 grant is supporting l the program’s efforts to improve recycling and reduce litter in Coral Gables, including establishing a new method for recycling beverage containers. The Flex Reverse Vending Machine and mobile recycling rewards software encourages consumers to return their recyclable bottles and cans and receive prizes through healthy competition.
Funds went towards installing a machine at the War Memorial Youth Center in Coral Gables with the goal of collecting over 25,000 bottles and cans within an initial pilot period, all to be recycled and remade.
“The Florida Beverage Association and its member companies are committed to working with those who share our goal of getting every bottle back through increased recycling and improving the communities where we live, work and play,” said Elizabeth Castro DeWitt, president of FBA, the trade association for Florida’s non-alcoholic beverage industry. “The Reverse Vending Incentive program will increase collections of valuable commodities, lower contamination rates and improve business participation in recycling initiatives, ensuring that valuable recyclable materials, like plastic bottles, do not end up in places where they shouldn’t. We are excited to collaborate with Coral Gables to create a more sustainable future for generations to come.”
“This grant allows us to continue expanding our recycling programs and services. The Reverse Vending Machine aligns well with our ongoing sustainability and innovation initiatives to help utilize technology to create a more sustainable and resilient community for current and future generations,” said Matthew Anderson, Resiliency and Sustainability Manager/Co-Executive Director of Keep Coral Gables Beautiful.
The city partnered with Cycle Technology, which launched a prototype of its Reverse Vending Machine at the University of Miami in September 2020. Cycle’s incentive-based recycling rewards have proven to increase collections by over 31% and provides an effective educational tool to families committed to improving recycling.
Dear Baffled, would glass be the right choice to get rid of the plastic? Sad that most people condemned to drinking out of BPA plastic that causes health problems. Water & Coke taste so much better coming out of a glass bottle. We should all go back to returning glass bottles at the grocery store like before. With the burden of returning the heavy bottles we’d be consuming less cheap soft drinks which don’t even have real sugar but HFCS. We’d be so much healthier as a nation; we all blimped out with so much convenience. So much treachery, so much ignorance around.
I applaud recycling initiatives. But make no mistake, they are window dressing on a plastic epidemic. Consumers are not the problem and recycling, reuse, and repurpose is not the anser. The only way to impact the epidemic of plastic is to stop it at the source. And it’s not like the oil & gas industry didn’t know about it — they knew and decided corporate profits were worth the exchange — like the tobacco industry. There’s a great documentary on the the topic — The Story of Plastic. Thanks to the State (bought by the retail federation lobby), Coral Gables and other localities are not “allowed” to self govern when it comes to single-use plastics — addressing the issue up the chain a bit.