Rome offers free metro travel for plastic recyclers until 2020: ATAC

Rome is attempting to turn environmentally friendly by offering free metro passes to travelers who re-cycle plastic bottles utilizing machines set in three of the Italian capital's stations. The initiative was launched early in July and has been successful. The initiative has proved so popular that 350,000 bottles have been recycled. According to the city's public transport company ATAC, the initiative will soon be extended across the metro network and run until 2020. The machines process 20,000 bottles daily, and on an average, customers carry somewhere in the range of 15 and 20 bottles simultaneously, ATAC says.

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Some of the determined recyclers have collected as many as 3,500 bottles in less than 20 days 

Some of the determined recyclers have collected as many as  3,500 bottles in less than 20 days worth some 175 tickets, an ATAC spokeswoman said. The plan has been welcomed by residents in a city with an incessant trash collection issue, where re-cycling is inconsistent and wasteful. The commuters need to download an application onto their cell phones which registers the number of tickets they have earned based on the number of bottles fed into the reusing machines.

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One ticket is valid for 100 minutes of travel costs 30 bottles

One ticket is valid for 100 minutes of travel costs 30 bottles, which must be inserted into the machine with the barcode label so that the machines are able to scan and register them on the app. The metro gates can directly read the app on mobile phones so that commuters participating in the initiative do not need to buy a normal ticket. Rome is the first capital city in the European Union to launch the scheme in metro stations. Similar schemes have already been adopted in Beijing and Istanbul.

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