Facebook Messenger Bot Answers Questions About What’s Recyclable

Facebook Messenger is good for contacting friends and businesses with questions, especially if you don’t have a phone number handy to send a text message or make a call. But when it comes to questions about what’s recyclable where you live, who do you contact?

There are thousands of recycling programs in the United States, and you may have heard the advice to “check locally” before you throw something in the recycling bin or the trash. Starting in Atlanta, Georgia, and Fort Worth, Texas, people can simply use Facebook Messenger to find out what’s recyclable in their community.

It’s the beginning of a national Communities for Recycling initiative by nonprofit The Recycling Partnership, Facebook and leading consumer packaged goods brands like PepsiCo, organizers say.

“We’ve built a lot of the answers into the bot experience so that it can be answered by artificial intelligence ...” says Cody Marshall, chief community strategy officer with The Recycling Partnership. “But if it’s a question we don’t have the answer to, The Recycling Partnership is helping the bot learn by finding out the answer from the city and getting back to the person and putting it into the bot itself.”

People in Atlanta and Fort Worth can use Facebook Messenger to find out if and how to recycle common items like plastic bottles, cardboard and metal as well as learn more about the recyclability of less commonly recyclable items like yogurt cups, pizza boxes and egg cartons.

Facebook, in a blog on the effort, noted that only 32% of recyclable materials are collected and recycled from U.S. households, resulting in more than 20 million tons of curbside recycling being lost to landfills each year.

The recycling bot was tested in Atlanta and Fort Worth in the fall, then again in February, and received a “tremendous” response, Marshall says.

The initiative was announced March 18 in honor of Global Recycling Day and the digital Messenger experience was launched this month to Atlanta and Fort Worth Facebook and Instagram users, in English and Spanish.

“In only a week, we have reached more than 900,000 people who live in these communities, and they’re staying engaged within the experience as our recycling IQ quiz completion rates have exceeded 90%,” Marshall says.

Although the Messenger bot is only available at the moment to curbside recyclers in Atlanta and Fort Worth, everyone is encouraged to check their recycling IQ with a nine-question quiz and join a national Communities for Recycling Facebook group.

The Recycling Partnership intends to offer the Messenger bot to more communities later this year, but won’t say which ones just yet. The nonprofit also plans to launch a national database with accurate recycling information on accepted materials for thousands of communities nationwide.

The Communities for Recycling initiative also is showcasing local heroes who give back to their communities through recycling. It’s an effort to influence positive recycling behaviors, as outlined in a recent report by The Recycling Partnership.

The bot intends to eliminate social media and brand messages to “check locally,” Marshall says.

Those messages can be no help at all if you don’t know where to check.

Contaminated recycling, with trash and other non-recyclables that go into recycling bins, is one of the biggest challenges facing the recycling system today, Marshall says.

The Messenger bot can provide easy access to information, reduce trash in the recycling stream, reduce costs for local recycling programs, make it safer for local recycling workers and help more recyclable materials make it into the circular economy to be remade into new packaging.

“With nearly 9,000 different local recycling programs across the country that have varied materials that they accept for recycling, it can get confusing.

“Confusion can result in recyclables in the trash. We want to end that confusion.”