Earn rewards for recycling? Now you can.

The road to the recycling bin may be paved with good intentions, but Americans still have a long way to go in this department — especially considering how much waste we generate. Reasoning that a little incentive couldn’t hurt, former management consultant Ron Gonen founded RecycleBank: a program that rewards households for their recycling efforts.

Each participating household gets a big blue recycling bin embedded with a computer chip. Each week the cart is scanned and weighed at the curb, the weight converted to points, and the points credited directly to an individual account. The points can be redeemed for discounts and rewards at hundreds of participating businesses, including Sears, CVS pharmacies, and Home Depot. To Gonen, it’s not just the economics, it’s the quantifiable sense of accomplishment. “RecycleBank tries to ensure that everything we do is measured — and we share those numbers,” he says in a Time magazine article. Like the Climate Change exhibitions multiplier effect interactive, a counter on the home page tracks the number of trees and gallons of oil that members have saved to date. Municipalities win too, because costs drop when less waste goes to landfills. Since launching successfully in Philadelphia in 2006, RecycleBank now operates through much of the Northeast. See if your town or borough is already a RecycleBank partner, or if not, how you can help make it happen.