Binly
Reward Birmingham for recycling right.
Pilot pitch · Q3 2026 · Lozells ward · Birmingham City Council
Birmingham recycles less than a third of its waste.
Birmingham household recycling rate, well below the 50% national target and lagging most English cities.
of items put in recycling bins are rejected for contamination - wrong items, dirty containers, wet paper. Each rejected lorry-load costs the council in landfill / disposal fees.
Birmingham's biggest waste reform in a decade starts this June.
Second recycling bin
Rolling out across the city - residents need to learn new rules fast.
Weekly food waste
A brand-new caddy system. Adoption depends on residents understanding what goes in it.
40% target by year-end
Council + Veolia have publicly committed. They will lean on every behaviour-change lever they can find.
There has never been a better window for a recycling rewards app in Birmingham.
Recycling rewards have been tried. Here's why they failed - and what changed.
Why it failed (2009–2016)
- Hardware-dependent verification. Recyclebank's UK trials (Windsor & Maidenhead, Halton) weighed bins via RFID-tagged lorries. ~£100/bin capital cost. Wound down by 2013.
- Wrong unit of measurement. Schemes paid by weight of recycling collected — which rewarded volume, including hoarding and bulking contaminated items into the bin.
- Abstract rewards, slow redemption. Birmingham itself ran a Nectar-points-for-recycling pilot in the early 2010s. Points felt nothing like a thank-you; redemption was weeks away.
- No teaching moment. Generic monthly statements ("you recycled X kg"). No per-item feedback. Residents couldn't improve even if they wanted to.
- Council economics didn't close. Pre-2018, contaminated UK recycling was exported to China at near-zero cost. Councils had no urgent cost to attack.
- Smartphone adoption ~50%. App-based verification wasn't viable. Web portals + SMS were clunky.
Why it works now (2026)
- Verify at decision, not collection. Smartphone in every hand: 92% UK adoption vs ~50% in 2010.
- Free on-device AI. Image classification that cost £0.30/call in 2015 now runs locally for £0.
- Local rewards land. Free coffee at the corner café beats a Nectar point - and aligns with values.
- Real-time learning. Every scan is a 5-second tip: "rinse this", "lid off", "wrong bin".
- Contamination now costs councils. Post-China import ban, rejected recycling is a £80–£140/tonne line item.
- Regulatory tailwind. Defra's Simpler Recycling mandates - every council is rebuilding services in 2026.
Teach first. Reward second.
The mechanism isn't the reward — it's the five-second teaching moment. Binly tells residents which bin, voice-guided, with the reason: rinse this, lid off, wrong stream for your council. Habit forms. Rewards are the hook that gets the app open.
Bin Session is the hero flow: open the camera once, hold each item up for a second, app auto-logs and voice-announces the bin. No tap per item. Scan the bin's QR mid-session to anchor every event to that physical bin — the integrity layer that lets us hand the council per-route data.
💡 Rinse if sticky. Crush to save bin space.
The fraud-prevention pipeline - four locked layers.
No phone-only accounts. Every reward earned is tied to a verified resident, at a verified address, sampled by Veolia, and gated by an escalation ladder.
Layer 2 is live in the prototype. Bin Session is a hands-free mode where residents scan the bin's QR sticker, then hold each item to the camera — every event is auto-logged + anchored to that physical bin. Verified-and-correct binning recovers integrity score; mismatches drop it. This is the pipeline working end-to-end before the pilot starts.
Where prior schemes broke (anonymous accounts, weight-only verification at the lorry) we close every loop. The scan-before-you-bin habit drives behaviour; this pipeline keeps the rewards economy honest enough for a council to put its name on it.
Everyone wins, and the council pays from money it's already losing.
One ward, 90 days, measurable impact.
Soft launch
Lozells. 50 households via community champions. Daily user interviews.
Ward rollout
Door-leaflet + QR. Target 500 active users. Bring in 6 local reward partners.
Measure & iterate
Veolia contamination samples vs. pre-pilot baseline. User retention. Council debrief.
Decision gate
Pitch city-wide expansion using ward delta as proof.
Why Lozells? The 2022–26 Ward Action Plan already prioritises community participation. Below-average current recycling rate = lots of upside. Mixed demographic = better generalisability.
Every English council faces the same wall in 2026.
The Simpler Recycling reforms
Defra has mandated standardised recycling streams across all English councils. Every local authority is rebuilding waste services in 2025–27. They all need behaviour change. They're all watching each other.
317 councils. 1 winner sets the pattern.
A Birmingham pilot success becomes a national playbook. Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool follow.
Revenue from three pockets - none from residents.
| What we charge | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| Council SaaS | £40k–£120k / year per council | Year-1 anchor. Based on population. Dashboard, support, hosting. |
| Pilot grants | £25k–£200k per pilot | Innovate UK Smart Grants, WRAP, BEAS match funding. |
| Partner placements | £200–£800 / month per featured reward | Local businesses pay for visibility - opt-in, no behavioural ads. |
| Binly Premium Year-2 | £4.99–£12.99 / month per household | Specialist collection (soft plastic, textiles, batteries, separated food) - complements council, doesn't compete. |
Year-1 = council pays. Year-2 = households opt in to Premium. Core scheme is free for residents forever - paywalls kill behaviour-change apps. Premium is purely additive speciality collection.
Six streams the kerbside service can't collect. We will.
Specialty pickup at the door. £4.99-£12.99/mo. Demand signal generated in-app on every scan that hits a stream the council bin doesn't serve.
The streams
Three tiers
Every Premium-stream scan surfaces a "Join waitlist" CTA. Conversion data ranks which routes to build first - hard demand evidence, not survey wishful thinking.
Logistics-only. We do not own sorting infrastructure at pilot scale.
Our regulatory footprint
- Waste Carriers Licence (Upper Tier) - £154/yr
- Waste Broker Licence - £171/yr
- Waste Exemptions S2/T1/T6 - free
- Public liability insurance - £400-800/yr
- Total compliance: under £1,200/yr
Own depot? Not yet.
Threshold: ~5,000 subscribers/city or multi-council consistency. £150-300k capex + £100k+/yr opex. That is a Series A problem, not a Smart Grant one. Pilot uses existing infrastructure as a customer.
From one ward to a national platform in 18 months.
Lozells pilot
500 users. Veolia data integration. First contamination delta.
City-wide Birmingham
10,000 users. Council SaaS contract signed. Local reward marketplace.
Second council + Binly Premium
Coventry / Wolverhampton (WMCA shared procurement). First Premium routes live - soft plastic + textiles pickup, £4.99–£12.99/mo tiers.
National pattern
5+ councils on SaaS. 1,500+ Premium subscribers in Birmingham (£25–70k profit/route). Pre-Series A.
Lean, council-grade, ship-first.
Founding team
Mathaius - Founder · Birmingham-based · driving council + community partnerships, product direction, and integrity-pipeline design.
Open seat: technical co-founder / fractional engineer for ID-verification SDK integration, Veolia data pipeline, and native iOS/Android delivery.
What's shipped (as of this deck)
- Working web prototype live at binlyrecycle.netlify.app — barcode + voice + AR scanning, council-aware bin logic, full reward UX, kids mode
- Bin Session — hands-free flow: one tap opens the camera, hold each item up for ~1s, app voice-announces the bin and auto-logs. The "every item, no friction" answer.
- Bin-QR session attribution — scan the bin's sticker mid-session and every subsequent log is anchored to that physical bin; integrity score climbs on verified-correct, drops on mismatches.
- Community preview on Home tab — street- / postcode-level signal card surfaces the peer-pressure frame from day one. Real multi-user leaderboard wires in at pilot launch; the UX scaffolding is already there.
- iOS app in TestFlight beta — Capacitor wrapper with Live Activities, home-screen widgets, Control Centre quick-scan
- Marketing site + UK-GDPR privacy policy at binlyrecyclingcom.netlify.app
Production-grade pilot delivery scoped at £150k total · £105k Innovate UK ask + £45k match (WRAP / BEAS / partners). 12-month plan including the 90-day Lozells deployment.
Why this team can win
- 🏘️ Local: rooted in Birmingham communities, not a London import.
- 🏛️ Council-first: built with the procurement reality in mind, not retrofitted.
- 📱 Hands-on: working prototype shipped before the pitch - try it now.
- 📊 Data-honest: we publish what works, including what doesn't.
£150k to run a measurable 12-month pilot.
| Line item | Cost | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Production build - founder labour (12 months, full-time) | £60,000 | Innovate UK |
| Fractional senior engineer - SDK, MRF data layer, native wrappers | £18,000 | Innovate UK |
| Store submission + Yoti/Onfido ID + Supabase backend (18 mo) | £13,500 | Innovate UK |
| Reward fund (Lozells pilot + city-wide seed) | £20,000 | WRAP + council |
| Community engagement (door-leaflet, ward champions, launch) | £10,000 | BEAS match |
| Bin-QR sticker production (15,000 units) + evaluation + case study | £11,500 | WRAP + council |
| Travel, founder setup (trademark, domains, legal) + ~10% contingency | £17,000 | Mixed |
| Total | £150,000 | Mixed |
Smart Grant £105k (70%) · Match £45k. If Lozells contamination drops 5pts, BCC recovers ~£42k in 90 days. City-wide: £450k-£720k/yr.
Honest risks. Honest mitigations.
| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Low adoption. People don't download. | Community champion model, in-person QR sign-ups, council-branded co-launch. |
| Reward economy breaks. Too generous → can't sustain. Too stingy → no engagement. | Variable points by item value. A/B test redemption thresholds in week 4. |
| Verification fraud. Users scan without binning. | Core problem we solve - see slide 6 four-layer pipeline. ID + bin-QR + audit + escalation ladder. No phone-only accounts allowed. |
| Council procurement delay. Pilot blocks on bureaucracy. | Run pilot as grant-funded research first; SaaS contract follows the data. |
| Big incumbent shows up. Veolia or a tech giant copies the model. | Veolia owns logistics, not consumer software distribution. Our integrity pipeline assumes Veolia as a partner (their MRF data feeds Layer 3). Strategic outcome is acquisition, not displacement. Three-year head start on the integrity-pipeline IP, the council relationships, and the integrity-score behavioural data is the moat. |
Three things, in this order.
20 minutes
With Birmingham City Council Waste Strategy team - to understand pilot requirements.
Letter of intent
Non-binding. Just enough to unlock Innovate UK Smart Grants application.
£150k pilot
Mix of grant + council budget. 90 days. Measurable. Defensible.
Let's recycle Birmingham.
The waste service is changing in June. The behaviour change won't happen by itself.
Contact
Mathaius · Founder, Binly Ltd
mathaius3333@gmail.com
Birmingham, UK · 2026