Momentum Recycling

In the beginning, the company operated as a mixed recycling hauler in Salt Lake City. The good news was that Momentum was seeing customers who wanted to recycle many materials, including glass. But the bad news was that the company realized it was hauling glass at a rate that glass processing companies couldn’t handle, and customers could not recycle their glass curbside, so they were throwing it into their garbage bins.

With some large investments in sustainability as well as the communities and businesses it serves — paired with digital tools from Routeware, including the Collection Calendar and Waste Wizard — Momentum Recycling is getting closer to meeting its zero-waste goals every day.

Identifying Needs, Developing Solution

Because of the reality Momentum and its customers faced when it came to glass recycling, the company decided it didn’t just need to haul glass and other recyclables; it needed to build a plant and process that glass,too. In 2012, it expanded its operations to include the processing and recycling of post-consumer glass to make glass recycling easier, maximize the diversion of glass from the landfill, and ensure that glass is recycled into high-quality end products.

Then, in 2016, it opened a state-of-the-art, bottle-to-bottle glass-recycling plant in Colorado, which has the capabilities to produce high-quality cullet, or recycled glass, for use in bottle manufacturing and in other local industries, its website states.

And that’s when Momentum Recycling’s real journey began.

Not only was Momentum operating the first curbside glass-collection program in Utah, it became the exclusive glass recycler for Salt Lake City, too. Since then, Momentum has become the “go-to” glass-processing plant for a number of states, including Utah, Colorado, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, which says a lot, considering it is much cheaper to dump glass in a landfill than is to recycle it.

But businesses and municipalities recycle with Momentum because they care.

Meeting Challenges Head On

“The challenges the company faces vary city by city”, said Momentum Recycling Accounts Manager Hanna Hard, “but they include all of the difficulties that come along with getting municipalities and residents on board to recycle glass in the first place, as well as the planning and work that it takes to get everything off the ground.”

But once all of that is in place, Hard said Routeware’s tools have helped a lot with collection reminders and more. She said Momentum is huge on customer engagement. Coincidentally, so is Routeware.

“When customers sign up with Momentum, we take the time to thoroughly promote and teach the tools to them, which really excites customers and helps them learn to self-serve”, Hard said. “But Momentum is a small company, especially in comparison with the amount of work that they do, and they can’t always employ enough staff to perhaps be as accessible as they would like to be.”

That’s where Routeware’s digital tools come into play.

Customers may set up collection notifications through Routeware’s Collection Calendar, which has really helped, Hard said, especially with coordinating dates and times for missed pickups.

Because of this tool, usage and pickup rates have increased. Customers have the ability to keep on top of their pickup schedules or coordinate new ones should they miss, which keeps customers happy and bins from overflowing.

Because Routeware’s tools are user-friendly, Hard can either change pickup scheduling within the tool, or she can teach customers over the phone about how to do it themselves.

Jason Utgaard, General Manager at Momentum Recycling, agrees. “Routeware’s communication tools allow us to do more, with less. They allow us to better engage our customers and offer the quality of customer support we strive for.”

In addition, the tools also help Momentum better direct its customer engagement. “I log in and can quickly see what materials people are having the most challenges with,” Hard said.

Momentum Recycling has the desire, the technology, and the drive to help its customers divert waste of all kinds from landfills and more, and with a little help from Routeware’s digital tools, it will continue to carry out its mission to help communities move toward zero waste.