“One of the things we’ve done is enable anyone in the country to join Recyclebank and not be tied to a curbside recycling program,” said Scott Lamb, chief operating officer at Recyclebank. “If you’re not associated with a curbside recycling program, you can still join and receive rewards for other green activities.”

This means virtual community members get rewards for viewing content related to recycling, entering promotion codes from product packaging and then promising to recycle the boxes, referring friends to join the online program, and other “green” activities, Lamb said.

“It is all in an effort to educate people about the right way to consume and recycle and how to have an impact on the environment,” Lamb said.

The changes have come about in a flurry of activity for the company, which initially partnered with local haulers to boost residential recycling. Residents loaded up smart-chipped recycling containers and wheeled them to the curb; haulers collected the recyclables, weighing the containers at the truck and then converting the weights to reward points for the residents. The residents then redeemed these points with Recyclebank for discounts on local and national products or services, or donated them to local schools.

Last year, Recyclebank teamed with Republic Services to expand its rewards program into a million more households. The company has a new CEO, Jonathan Hsu, who joined the company in October. Recyclebank’s former CEO and co-founder, Ron Gonen, stepped down from the top spot in June but retained his seat on the board of directors. In January, Recyclebank hired Javier Flaim as global marketing senior vice president, and in early February the company created a Sustainability Advisory Council and began identifying itself as “a sustainable action platform” in its press releases. Part of the new initiatives include the online expansion and integration with social networks.

“We’re trying to make it very social and grow our membership base so we can expand exponentially and not be tied to our core model of curbside recycling,” Lamb said.

The new website makes social engagement very important and also makes it easier for consumers to find local rewards partners, Lamb said.

“We’ve always been very local in terms of our rewards partners, but our previous website made it very difficult to segregate local partners from national partners,” he said.

The site is now searchable by ZIP code to make searching easier.

The online expansion doesn’t mean the curbside program has fallen by the wayside, Lamb said. The program will benefit from additional online revenue, he said.

“The digital and social acquisition strategy, things like that, will hopefully be able to monetize members that are participating in our program and turn those dollars back into our curbside program,” Lamb said. “We’ll continue to provide a curbside program at a very low cost to more and more cities and haulers. That’s really been a new shift for us, trying to get a large member base and then covert any monetization back into the curbside program, and to try to grow both at the same time.”