Washington, D.C., is about to welcome 363 recycling centers that encourage residents to recycle by giving them rewards for the bottles and cans they drop of in the interactive kiosks.
PepsiCo today announced a partnership with the DowntownDC Business Improvement District (BID) and the District Department of Public Works (DPW) that will make D.C. the nation's first city to partner with the Dream Machine recycling initiative. However, 20 states throughout the country already host a total of 1,500 Dream Machines as part of PepsiCo' program aiming to increase the U.S. beverage container recycling rate from 34 to 50 percent by 2018.
"This partnership will have real results," said Richard H. Bradley, executive director of the DowntownDC BID. "We are projecting a diversion of more than one million pounds of recyclable material annually from downtown waste."
For all the bottles and cans recycled in a Dream Machine bin or kiosk in Washington, D.C., and across the nation, PepsiCo will make a contribution to the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV), a national program offering free, experiential training in entrepreneurship and small business management to post-9/11 U.S. veterans with disabilities.
"The unemployment rate among young veterans today is 20 percent—its highest rate in the post-9/11 era," said J. Michael Haynie, EBV founder and assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management. "Bringing the Dream Machine program to Washington, D.C., represents an opportunity for the city and its residents to play a direct role in helping our returning veterans create their own jobs in the most American way possible, through entrepreneurship."
Dream Machine kiosks are computerized receptacles that include a personal reward system that allows consumers to collect and redeem points for each bottle or can they recycle by visiting greenopolis.com.
PepsiCo's Dream Machine recycling initiative, which aims to place both interactive kiosks and bins, was created in partnership with Waste Management and Keep America Beautiful. The Dream Machines are provided by WM GreenOps, LLC, a subsidiary of Waste Management, and operated by Greenopolis.
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