Waste Management partners with Whole Foods, Recyclebank

In separate arrangements, Waste Management, Inc. (Houston, TX) is partnering with organic food retailer Whole Foods Market (Austin, TX) to provide food waste recycling and composting to several municipalities in the Greater Chicago area, and it is making a strategic investment in Recyclebank (Wilmington, DE) under which Recyclebank will take over Waste Management’s Greenopolis recycling program. Expanding a program that Whole Foods Launched in February 2011 at stores in Schaumburg and Sauganash, Whole Foods and Waste Management will bring the program to additional stores in Deerfield, Naperville, Palatine, Northbrook, Evanston, and Chicago’s Lincoln Park area. Whole Foods said that it plans to recover more than 80% of the out-of-date foods at these stores and use them to produce soil amendments for landscaping. Waste Management and Recyclebank plan to expand the Greenopolis program, which operates a network of about 1,000 reverse vending machines that accept bottles and cans, from 3 million members corrently to about 20 million households.