Three and a ½ years ago, we embarked on looking at the possibility of recycling as many of our ALGON manufactured bottles as possible. Our catch phrase, “Saving Ther World One Bottle At A Time”.
As a trial, we approached several of our “cornerstone retailers” placing ALGON branded recycling bins in their stores promoting the return of our bottles. The first season was a little slow; however, we persevered with promising progress over the next 3 years.
This was achieved with ongoing promotion and training shop staff of the benefits in promoting this programme – i.e. customer returns empty bottle for recycling and this promotes the opportunity for another potential instore sale = win/win.
One of the many benefits to our programme is our bottles do get recycled – kerbside recycling sees any bottles that contained chemicals diverted to landfill. Research showed us people wanted to recycle, felt an obligation to do so, however there was never an easy mechanism to do so – how easy have we made it to return your ALGON bottle and knowing full well it will be recycled.
All our returned bottles are rinsed and have the labels removed (note- our labels are also recycled). We now have retailers on board from Northland through to the Waikato – all retailers involved in the programme simply love what we are doing and totally back our initiative.
Over the last 2 years, we have expanded the programme to include any “type 2 HDPE” plastic containers (must be from the pool industry) – yes so, we now include competitors containers.
Last season, 2022-2023 we recycled a little over 4000kgs of plastics. This season we had a goal of recycling in excess of 10,000 kgs – to date we are well on the way to achieving our target, in fact most probably exceeding this goal.
Our latest initiative is recycling water test spin discs. This has proven extremely popular and although early days volumes returned has been well above expectations. And along with spin discs we are currently trialling a programme for recycling empty salt bags.
We have also this season started a “repurposing programme”. This involves taking a percentage of our ALGON returned bottles and turning them into promotional scoops – Photo. These have proven extremely popular as promotional giveaways. Once again greatly appreciated by our retailers who, in turn, give these away to their customers as a gift.
If you are reading this and have some ideas how we can improve on an already successful programme please do contact us. We are passionate, and extremely excited about the endless possibilities of this project and certainly welcome any feedback to continually improve.
