PHOENIX — The city of Phoenix announced Monday that it had cut a rewards-based program that offered residents gift cards and other retail discounts if they would recycle.

Joe Giudice, the assistant public works director with the City of Phoenix, told KTAR News 92.3 FM that the city decided to end its contact with Recyclebank after the program was not delivering the results that the city had hoped for.

The city had been working with Recyclebank and a host of other programs in an effort to increase the number of residents participating in recycling.

It had been working with Recyclebank for two years and had spent $3.3 million on the program, according to The Arizona Republic. Recyclebank said nearly 120,000 residents participated in the program.

Phoenix had a goal of diverting 40 percent of trash from the landfill by 2020, Giudice said.

“We have some very lofty goals for diversion in Phoenix,” he added. “We have an aggressive timeline to achieve those goals and RecycleBank was one of the programs we had hoped would help us achieve that goal. ”

Giudice said the city had built “tight measurements” into its contract with Recyclebank in order to reach that 40 percent goal, but realized that results from a May study “didn’t demonstrate that we were achieving the targets that we were wanting to achieve.

“We decided that it would be a good time to move on from that program in order to focus on programs that would help us get to that goal,” he added.

While city officials are not sure why residents did not respond well to the Recyclebank program, Giudice said the city still has many other programs that are generating success toward its diversion goal.

Those programs include a compositing facility, a textile-collecting company and a program dubbed “Oops! Shine on,” a direct intervention recycling program where officials give residents direct feedback about their recyclables.

KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Kathy Cline and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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