Recycling incentive scheme Greenredeem and consumer goods company Unilever are calling on members of the public to donate their recycling points to the Comic Relief charity, to help support the charity’s work in the UK and across Africa.

Consumers can earn points from Greenredeem for pledging to make changes to their lifestyle or actively recycling. For example, pledging to recycle Persil bottles will earn users 10 points. Points can eventually be redeemed against vouchers for shops or experience days.

However, as part of a new partnership with Unilever, Greenredeem is now urging its 135,000 users to donate their points to Comic Relief ahead of Red Nose Day on 13 March.

Up until 31 March (or until the maximum £20,000 limit has been reached), Unilever will donate £1 to the charity for every 250 points donated. Once the funding total is achieved then no further donations may be made.

For this amount of points to be donated, Greenredeem calculates that members would have to recycle around 1,000 tonnes of material.

To help promote the campaign, Unilever will advertise the Greenredeem partnership on its Persil and PG Tips brands.

Driving behaviour change

Anna Owen, from Unilever’s Project Sunlight said: “It’s shocking how far the UK lags behind other nations and we see incentivising positive action as a key mechanic to move rates forward, to meet and hopefully smash 2020 [recycling] target levels.

“To drive behaviour change we know you need to make it easy, fun and rewarding to do the right thing. We hope that through the partnership we can educate our consumers that they can recycle more Unilever product packaging than they may realise.

“The Red Nose Day points for donations launch campaign is a brilliant way for us to donate more to Comic Relief and encourage recycling in the process.”

Rob Crumble, Greenredeem’s Communications Director, added: “We’re thrilled to be working with one of the world’s leading consumer goods companies to help people be rewarded for taking green actions.

“We see this groundbreaking partnership as a real motivation for more local authorities to take a rewarding approach to recycling, enabling them to access a powerful partnership between the private and public sector to drive behavioural change at a local level.”

The Greenredeem/ partnership forms part of Unilever’s ‘Project Sunlight’ banner, which was launched in 2013 to highlight sustainability issues. Most recently, the project undertook a prime-time advertising campaign to draw attention to food waste.

Value for money ‘unproven’ in recycling schemes

Despite central government and recycling incentive schemes promoting the use of rewards for sustainable behaviour, it is not fully supported by evidence from the recycling and environmental sector.

Environmental consultancy Eunomia undertook a report last year into the impacts and potential benefits of recycling incentives and found that for current UK reward schemes (outside of those covered by Defra’s Reward and Recognition Fund), ‘value for money is unproven’, and in some cases, could actually cost more than the ‘evaluated benefits they deliver’.

An interim report from Brook Lyndhurst into Defra’s Household Reward and Recognition Fund, meanwhile, appears to have come to a similar conclusion, finding that improvements in recycling and reuse tend to be linked to ‘better services and promotion rather than being attributable directly to rewards’.

Find out more about Unilever and Greenredeem’s Comic Relief partnership or the debate over recycling incentives.