Waste management
Rags to riches

One person’s trash is another person’s reward points, redeemable now at a store near you. RecycleBank is updating the old adage for the 21st century, and while it may lack the immediate poetry of the original, it has at least alighted on a dynamic, eco-conscious money-spinner.

Shocked by American citizens’ general lax attitude to personal waste, Columbia University MBA student and software maven Ron Gonen felt certain that a little “nudge” in the right direction could make all the difference. “I started asking ‘what would happen if people were paid to recycle?’ and one thing led to another,” recalls Gonen, now 32. In 2004, with seed funding from Columbia’s Entrepreneur Greenhouse Fund, RecycleBank launched.

Under the scheme individuals are rewarded with credits for the material they recycle, measured using hassle-free recycling dustbins implanted with chips linked to a database. Credits, capped at $35 (€25) per month, can then be used at more than 1,500 participating stores and brands, including Target and Coca-Cola. Other related initiatives include the eBay Green Team (points are awarded for purchasing recycled goods), the Gconomy Visa card (one RecycleBank point is received for every $1 spent), an electronic waste scheme, and recycling kiosks at colleges.

Meanwhile, those people who don’t want to consume more can transform their credits into charitable donations.

While cities save on landfill costs – and the world becomes that little bit cleaner – recycling businesses like RecycleBank profit. The company takes a cut of each city’s landfill savings, typically around 50%, and generates additional revenue from ads on its website (points redeemers avidly check their accounts) and by mining data about the stuff people end up recycling. RecycleBank knows where you live, what you buy, how much you buy and when you buy it.

More than one million people in 25 US states have signed up and in some communities 90% of the population are RecycleBank devotees and landfill reductions often soar toward the 40% mark.

The company has also bagged around $70m (€50m) from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, former American Express CEO James Robinson, Coca-Cola, RRE Ventures and Sigma Partners.

RecyleBank is now gaining traction in Europe, with successful pilot scheme in Windsor and Maidenhead, south-east England. “If you want long-term behaviour change you’re going to have to do it through regulatory enforcement or reward,” says Gonen. “I want RecycleBank to change people’s views of consumption.”

Technology
Connected homes

With a few expensive exceptions, the promise of the connected home has remained just that – a promise. A new trend, however, is disparate gadgets – bathroom scales, say, or a music system – that interconnect using Wi-fi technology.

“We are only scraping the very top of the opportunities for connected devices,” says Rob Enderle, consumer analyst and principal at Enderle Group. “With the web behind a device, it can be remotely monitored, its technology can be updated and it can be made more capable more cheaply by spreading the cost of a technology across a number of connected devices.”

The TV is increasingly connecting to the internet, either through set-top boxes or built-in functionality, with manufacturers competing to finesse the technology.

“The Samsung platform allows companies to develop one app that works across multiple devices and delivers a consistent and intuitive experience for consumers,” says Olivier Manuel, director of content at the electronics giant. “Using the Blockbuster app, a user can start watching a movie on their downstairs TV say, pause it, and then pick it up from exactly where they left off upstairs from their Blu-ray player.”

One of the most unusual devices in this new connected home is the WikiReader, part of a growing trend to move the internet from the PC into the physical world. Essentially a portable encyclopedia that uses Wikipedia information, the device does not connect to the internet in real-time, instead it is periodically connected to your computer for updates. It is meant for those who need to quickly access reference material.

WikiReader was created by Taipei-based OpenMoko, which uses an open design process to develop hardware. Founder Sean Moss-Pultz believes connected gadgets are part of an evolution from “wow isn’t technology wonderful” to more practical uses. “Michael Faraday [the English chemist] wrapped a coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet,” says Moss-Pultz. “Wrap efficient communication, i.e. the internet, around everyone on the planet and spin – something great will emerge. The fact that so many devices are ‘connecting’ is just an emergent property of communication progress. It’s another form of induction.”

There is a growing list of unlikely devices interconnecting via Wi-Fi. A sleek black design, accurate weight measurement, and a cost of just €150 are not even the most remarkable features of the Withings Wi-fi Scale: through Wi-Fi, it can be used to let friends and family track your weight loss.

Then there is the Sony Dash, a new connected device that looks like a clock radio but is designed as an easy way to check emails, Twitter status, and other services. The app-centric design allows you to expand content by installing new apps.

“This is about offering unique control over smaller gadgets throughout your house, room by room,” says Robert Fuest, a financial analyst at Landor & Fuest in New York. “If this could be applied into a larger scale where applications flow through a similar device, and that device is controllable by a smart phone, the market will see significant growth.”

He says there is a huge opportunity for devices like the Dash, especially for personalised advertising and for remote control of other devices.

The interconnect opportunities in entertainment alone are evidenced by Squeezebox Radio, a device that supports internet radio stations and can share your music with other web users, and premier music networking brand Sonos’ S5 ZonePlayer, an all-in-one speaker and amplifier you can access from your iPhone. You can queue music, access internet radio, and even adjust volume from your phone.

“Ultimately everything will be pushed to the edge of the network where the user experiences it,” says Sonos co-founder Tom Cullen, explaining how gadgets will move from running on PCs to phones and finally on household gadgets. “Homes will have internet-connected screens in every room, because they will be so cheap and useful.”

Indeed, says Enderle, it is likely that soon every home oven will have embedded radio-frequency ID tags that communicate information with the web.

Culture
Art movement

This month, Paris’s venerable Centre Georges Pompidou, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano and opened in 1977, will get a new €69m sibling when a branch opens in Metz, France. Conceived by Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines as a series of modules around a central spire, the Centre Pompidou-Metz is capped by an undulating lattice structure, made from 11 miles of glue-laminated timber beams, and sheathed in a fibreglass and Teflon membrane. The inaugural exhibition, Chefs d’œuvre?, will consider the notion of masterpiece and feature some 800 modern works, mainly from the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

As a result of France’s first major cultural decentralisation project, Metz – a crossroads between two of Europe’s greatest routes: the North Sea-Mediterranean route from Amsterdam to Marseilles, and the Paris-Eastern Europe route leading to Munich, Prague and Vienna – is anticipated to receive an economic boost. A TGV rail link makes the museum an 80-minute trip from Paris.

Museum satellites are the thing of the moment. Work is under way on Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi, beside Frank Gehry’s branch of the Guggenheim, while London’s V&A Museum recently announced plans to open a branch in Dundee, Scotland, by 2014.