PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia is home to the region’s first sustainability search engine that seeks to reduce over 2 billion pounds of waste sent to local landfills and incinerators each year.
Resource Philly is a new platform that offers solutions for donating or selling items that can’t be put in curbside recycling bins, including roller skates, musical instruments and string lights.
Circular Philadelphia partnered with Resource Exchange, a nonprofit shop, gallery and workshop space that promotes creative reuse and recycling to ignite this project.
“We really took what the Resource Exchange had built and stewarded for over a decade and turned it into an online, searchable engine for folks to come and find all sorts of things, not just where to get rid of things at the end of their life, but also how to source things that are sustainable and circular,” said Samantha Wittchen, interim executive director of Circular Philadelphia.
Wittchen says each year, about 1,150,000 tons of waste are either burned or buried in the Philadelphia region.
“And then if you extend that larger into the Southeast Pennsylvania region, the collar counties included in that, you get to more like 3 million tons of waste that is getting burned or buried,” she said.
But, with ResourcePhilly.org, people can search for what they’d like to donate or sell, and the website provides a prioritized list of resources with links and information.
“It's reliable information about what places take in, and how you know when they're open, and how to do that. It will be updated on a continual basis. We will continue to do that to make sure that it is a reliable source of information for people in the Philadelphia region,” Wittchen said, adding this is an important step toward “making Philadelphia cleaner and greener.”