An Economic Incentive to Clean Trash
Have a bit more serious of an article planned for you today — on creating an economic incentive to benefit nature. Similar to 4ocean and Keep Nature Wild, a main motivation of RGP is to actually benefit nature via the process of making money. By being profit driven, we are incentivized to provide the best service possible to our customers, and the planet at the same time.
The first iteration of this goal was collecting recycled plastics (HDPE2), melting them down, turning them into dice, and selling the dice. That was a super cool way to make money, but quite time intensive compared to profit margin. At low scale, no future in that.
The next iteration was to sell merchandise in relation to amount of trash cleaned. One item sold = one bag cleaned. We still technically do this today, although have sold far fewer items than bags cleaned, and I’m not about to stop cleaning trash for the purpose of holding tight with this goal. Don’t see sales picking up drastically anytime soon either. So, while this was a good idea, and you can still buy gear on our website, this may not be the move.
Then — what next? Is there an original way to clean trash at a profit, where those profits are tied to the incentive of clean environments? The answer is obviously yes…..somehow.
As of right now, we have the patreon, where anyone can pitch in each month to support what we do. There is the potential route of going nature YouTube channel mode and cleaning there. TikTok has already been explored and feels gimmicky. This blog, as you may be able to tell, is more for me than you. But there’s an excellent solution here yet which ties in the economic growth of a for profit company with the necessary work that needs to be done to best preserve our natural environments. I will be searching relentlessly for an answer and I will be blogging, cleaning, and vibing while doing so.
At the end of the day, at least we keep on cleaning! The bag pictured above is #2535. That counts for something.
