City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage Receives Recycling Bins through Coca-Cola/Keep America Beautiful Public Space Recycling Grant Program

City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage Receives Recycling Bins through Coca-Cola/Keep America Beautiful Public Space Recycling Grant Program

Latest Public Space Recycling Bin Grant Cycle Awards 3,250 Recycling Bins through 2017 Bringing Total Recycling Bins Donated to 1 Million

June 25, 2018 — NEW YORK, NY — Coca-Cola with the help of national nonprofit Keep America Beautiful and many other partners and communities across the country, reached a milestone this year. The Company and its partners achieved the 1 million mark for recycling bins donated to communities.

As part of the 2017 Coca-Cola/ Keep America Beautiful Public Space Recycling Bin grant cycle, 3,250 bins are currently being distributed to communities, including 30 bins to City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage, which helped bring the total count of recycling bins donated to local communities by Coca-Cola to 1 million, in total.

“Coca-Cola has a long history of supporting community recycling programs in an effort to ensure that our packaging is recycled and reused,” said Bruce Karas, vice president of sustainability, Coca-Cola North America. “Through partnerships like Keep America Beautiful, we are able to improve access to recycling while also continuing to make progress towards our global goal of collecting and recycling a bottle or can for every one we sell.”

SummerStage in Central Park will use the donated recycling bins throughout its site at Rumsey Playfield in Manhattan. The bins assist SummerStage in its mission to reduce waste and keep the venue and NYC Parks green.

The Coca-Cola Cola Keep America Beautiful Public Space Recycling Bin Grant Program supports Coca-Cola’s newly announced World without Waste initiative, which aims to collect and recycle a bottle or can for every one the Company sells by 2030. For the past decade, The Coca-Cola Foundation and Keep America Beautiful have offered the recycling bin grant program to 1,000 communities across the U.S. and Puerto Rico to address one of the primary barriers to recycling in public spaces – access and convenience. In addition to the grants, Keep America Beautiful provides technical best practice guidance to grant recipients and organizations about setting up effective away-from-home and on-the-go recycling programs.

Coca-Cola has invested more than $13 million in innovative partnerships that bring curbside recycling programs to communities, help educate Americans on where to recycle, and support large-scale recycling infrastructure. With the addition of the latest Coca-Cola /Keep America Beautiful recycling grant, as well as other recycling initiatives in partnership with The Recycling Partnership and the Closed Loop Fund, Coca-Cola and its partners will achieve the 1 million recycling bins donation milestone.

“To encourage people to recycle frequently, we need to make sure they have the proper bins available in as many locations as possible,” said Helen Lowman, president and CEO, Keep America Beautiful. “The support Coca-Cola has given us to continue with this grant program allows us to address this issue and create thousands of new opportunities for people to recycle in public areas across the country.”

Grant recipients were chosen by Keep America Beautiful based on their potential to collect the most cans and bottles as well other considerations such as the potential to leverage further local investment in recycling infrastructure. A full list of the 2017 Coca-Cola/Keep America Beautiful Public Space Recycling Bin Grant recipients, as well as Keep America Beautiful’s best practices guide, “Designing Effective Public Space Recycling Programs,” are available at http://bingrant.org.

A 2009 study conducted by Keep America Beautiful showed only 12 percent of surveyed public locations had infrastructure to recover recyclable items. This lack of recycling opportunities is reflected in a separate national survey conducted for Keep America Beautiful in 2013, in which 92 percent of respondents said they recycle at home while only 41 percent indicated that they typically recycle in public spaces. In addition to providing more convenient opportunities to recycle, the Coca-Cola/Keep America Beautiful Public Space Recycling Bin Grant Program helps to address the issue of confusion by providing bins that incorporate recognized best practices for bin design and labeling.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email