Recycle Track Systems

Recycle Track Systems

Type	Private
ISIN	🆔
Industry	Recycling, Waste Management, Technology Smart Cities
Founded 📆	2014
Founders 👔	Gregory Lettieri and Adam Pasquale
Headquarters 🏙️	, West Village, New York , United States
Area served 🗺️	New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago
Key people	Gregory Lettieri, CEO Adam Pasquale, COO Lew Frankfort, Executive Chairman of Coach Shazi Visram, Founder of Happy Family Brands
Services	Efficient Waste Removal, Construction & Demolition, Dumpsters, Sustainability, Education
Members
Number of employees
🌐 Website	www.rts.com
📇 Address
📞 telephone

Recycle Track Systems (RTS) is a cloud-based waste management and recycling company with a heavy emphasis on sustainability. RTS uses data analytics and a tracking system to provide trash collection, recycling and waste hauling. RTS has created an on-demand waste pickup application.

RTS developed a mobile app to offer real-time tracking and the amount and type of waste created so that services can be customized. RTS works with businesses trying to meet sustainability objectives, clients who need help maximizing their diversion and those required to reduce or track waste by state or local regulations. RTS also serves high sustainability customers who want to know that their efforts to separate out food waste and recyclables are effective. By tracking waste data and movement, the company can provide real-time tracking related to trash and recycling. The company’s ability to track waste streams has given it an edge in navigating city regulations that require businesses to separate more and more of their trash, including electronics and food waste.

RTS’s main offering is its software platform and mobile application, which allow customers to schedule on-demand pick-ups. RTS does regularly scheduled pick-ups. It contracts with local haulers, providing them with tablets that run RTS software.

RTS is a waste and recycling garbage company that does not own its own trucks. To develop this virtual fleet, RTS partners with sanitation companies to transport garbage by installing rideshare tech in their trucks. Client companies get multiple notifications on where their waste is going via RTS’s software and experts in waste management. RTS also offers on-demand service for larger items like furniture or electronics.

Environmental concerns are a focus of RTS.

History

RTS was co-founded by CEO Gregory Lettieri and COO Adam Pasquale in 2014. Pasquale, a fourth-generation member of a New York waste-hauling family, imagined a company that could improve the $65 billion garbage market and provide waste pickups on demand using technology that has transformed other transportation sectors. Pasquale, whose great grandfather started in the garbage business with pushcarts on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy in the early 1900s, presented the idea to Lettieri while the two watched the 2014 World Cup. Lettieri asked for a PowerPoint that detailed the idea and Pasquale later presented a more formal business plan. Within 30 days, they had filed paperwork to create the company. At the time, Lettieri built tech portals for traders and was working in the telecommunications industry as a senior vice president at Bank of America. Pasquale took over his father's firm, Sam Pasquale Carting, in 1998 and later worked in sales before he sold the company to Action Carting. The two quit their jobs and launched Recycle Track Systems Inc. in 2015 with Whole Foods as one of its first contracts.

Corporate information

RTS launched with 12 full-time employees and a handful of part-time and technology contractors specializing in code. In 2017, RTS brought on 10 new employees to train company contractors in sustainability. RTS now has 32 employees and is a certified B-Corp.

The headquarters and founding market for RTS is New York City. A $11.7 investment round allowed it to expand into Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. They also operate in Chicago, offering its services to restaurants, schools, hotels, stadiums, large property management and supermarkets. RTS also offers consultation for clients that have sites in other locations, like WeWork.

Funding rounds

The first investors in RTS were a friends-and-family group, including Pasquale’s father. That group invested in the company before it launched it in 2015. Revenue hit $10 million in 2017, up 300 percent from 2016. In June 2017, the company closed a series A financing round worth $11.7 million with Boston-based growth equity firm Volition Capital, the former U.S. team of Fidelity Ventures. Volition also provided the first outside money into Chewy, a pet supplies company that sold to PetSmart earlier this year in the biggest e-commerce sale to date. Former CEO and Executive Chairman of Coach, Inc. Lewis Frankfort joined RTS as a member of the board following the investment.

Business model

RTS serves two audiences: Customers producing waste (known as “generators”) and companies that own the garbage trucks. For generators, RTS uses a recurring business model, focused on signing contracts and retaining recurring business. RTS takes a percentage of the monthly recurring pickup fee and a share of on-demand charges for extra material like a refrigerator from a restaurant or a mattress from a hotel. The customer experience has been compared to the online food ordering company, Seamless, or the app-based car service, Uber.

Virtual fleet

As an asset-light business, RTS partners with mid-size, independent haulers and provides them with tablets. To improve waste pickup, RTS integrates mobile technology and data analytics into the waste collections process to offer transparency and verification. RTS uses a app to find the best match between a hauler’s existing routes and customers. Unlike rideshare services, once a hauler and a customer are matched, RTS maintains that relationship rather than sending the nearest available truck the next time. GPS directions are embedded in the app and the company can email and text clients as trucks are arriving. Though it has no trucks, RTS owns trash and recycling containers that it supplies to clients. RTS staffers train clients in how to separate trash to comply with city regulations.

Products

RTS offers four technology products: A customer-facing application for smartphones, a tablet equipped with turn-by-turn GPS truck routing and a digital routing sheet, a desktop CRM tool for haulers and customers and an internal application that remotely tracks trucks and service orders.

Impact

RTS is a certified B Corporation. It has taken part in New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio's Zero Waste Challenge and has helped companies such as Whole Foods adhere to new New York City regulations by increasing the amount of waste diverted from landfills by 50%.

On the consumer side, RTS developed a network of composting and other organic recycling options and has a niche in food waste recycling.

Partnerships

RTS handles waste removal and recycling for more than 500 customers, including Whole Foods, WeWork The Pierre Hotel, Juice Press, Dean and Deluca and Soul Cycle. RTS tracks materials as they travel to composting and recycling facilities and provides companies with reports that show how much material was recycled or composted. On March 1, 2017, RTS started a contract to service the Google NYC HQ with a focus on diverting food waste and recycling from the landfill. RTS also services the Statue of Liberty.

Sports partnerships

RTS has partnered with several sports teams and venues, including the Barclays Center, Citi Field, the Washington Nationals and the D.C. United.

Citi Field has been working with RTS since October 2017. RTS provided Citi Field with a top-to-bottom plan that includes signage, staff training, fan education, bins and comprehensive waste tracking. The aim is to keep organic waste free of plastic cups and straws so that composting farms will accept it. RTS monitors how much food waste is diverted from landfills—where it breaks down into methane and contributes to global warming—and provides documentation the Mets can use in promoting their ecofriendliness. In one of their largest collaborations with the Citi Field, RTS helped clean up after the 2018 National Hockey League Winter Classic. After the event, RTS donated 18,000 square footage of plywood used to build the rink, and 27 rolls of unused snow to Materials for the Arts, a Long Island City, NY-based program that supports thousands of non-profit organizations and public schools throughout the Big Apple.

When Audi Field earned LEED Gold certification for the 20,000-seat, $500 million stadium, it partnered with RTS and New Columbia Solar to create a more sustainable facility. RTS also holds contracts with D.C. United and the Washington Nationals, and is implementing a set of initiatives at Audi Field and Nationals Park including recycling, food waste composting, educational materials and staff training.

Customer education

RTS makes short educational pregame videos meant to teach people about the appropriate bins to dispose of waste. Food waste is often the biggest issue in a stadium venue, said RTS CEO Greg Lettieri, estimating 5,000 pounds of food on average can be diverted from landfills per game at Nationals Park and an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 pounds at Audi Field through the company's services. Food that can be salvaged, like the uneaten meals, is often donated.

Awards

RTS was honored in the Best for Environment list, based on an independent, comprehensive assessment administered by the nonprofit B Lab. The Best for Environment list includes businesses that earned environment scores in the top 10 percent of more than 2,400 Certified B Corporations, across all categories on the B Impact Assessment. The assessment measures a company's positive impact on its workers, community, customers and the environment.

References

This article "Recycle Track Systems" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Recycle Track Systems. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

This page exists already on Wikipedia.

---