The Thermostat Recycling Corporation (TRC) is a non-profit stewardship organization based in Pennsylvania that facilitates and manages the safe collection and proper disposal of mercury-containing thermostats. Originally founded in 1998 by Honeywell, White-Rodgers, and General Electric, the program is currently supported by 30 manufacturers with the collective goal of keeping mercury out of the waste stream to protect the environment.
We’ve enjoyed a long-term relationship with TRC beginning in 2011 with an initial website rebuild and email marketing support. Several years later, we rebuilt their website on an updated platform that included a portal to facilitate the distribution of public information related to thermostat collection to help with mandated state reporting. We have worked with them on campaigns to drive new collection points and on the creation of marketing materials, including downloadable and printable assets that encourage and educate people on recycling thermostats.
TRC had been using an internal database to keep track of how many thermostats they had recycled, however it was outdated and no longer met their needs. We evaluated and identified a replacement framework system that would continue to support their existing requirements, as well as new efforts they wanted to pursue. From there, we built a customized complete thermostat recycling database collection system on a Salesforce Force.com platform with external APIs that allowed for searchability within the database through the website. We loaded nearly 20 years of historical data from the old system. Now, TRC can see, at a glance, any collection point, town, county, state, or radius and how many thermostats have been collected over any given time period. This suite of tools has multi-tasked as their business intelligence tool, their data reporting tool, and as their customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
We also created GIS data tools that mapped collection densities and plotting data across the U.S. to allow for analysis. We installed reporting tools and a business intelligence suite called Tableau, which allows for advanced statistical analysis and graphical analysis of data that all interfaces with their application and allows them to get a dashboard-like view of their operations. In addition, TRC had been manually creating annual reports for every state they had compliance with, taking hundreds of hours of time at great expense. We helped automate the statistical analysis and presentation of these reports and graphs through the database with the click of a button, saving them thousands of dollars annually.
We have been delivering marketing, digital, CRM, and operational strategy for this environmentally focused nonprofit since 2011, consistently looking for opportunities to reduce cost and improve visibility of data, ultimately resulting in less mercury in the waste stream.