A winning game plan

After being selected for a $7 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) in the summer of 2024, Batteries Plus partnered with Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers to launch a battery recycling initiative to educate and raise awareness among Packers fans. According to the organizations, representatives of which spoke during Recycling Today’s Battery and Critical Metals Recycling Conference this June, their partnership offers a model for other companies to use going forward.

Partnering to raise awareness

The partnership was announced in August of last year at Lambeau Field, with Jennifer Granholm, who was then the U.S. Secretary of Energy, and others from the DOE in attendance to support the initiative.

The DOE grant Batteries Plus received was intended to increase battery recycling nationwide by removing financial barriers for consumers, enhancing operational efficiencies and educating communities on responsible battery recycling.

Batteries Plus was founded in Green Bay in 1988 and now is headquartered in Hartland, Wisconsin, with more than 700 locations in 45 states and Puerto Rico. The company processed 50 million pounds of batteries annually, including more than 1 million pounds of lithium-based batteries, prior to the programs’ launch and aims to recycle more batteries than it sells through its free program.

The partnership with the Packers, which ran through the 2024-2025 football season, encouraged fans to drop off their used batteries at their local Batteries Plus store for free, making them eligible to win experiences, prizes and other incentives, including the opportunity to present the game ball at a Packers’ home game. Wisconsin schools also were invited to participate in battery recycling contests, with the winning classroom receiving an exclusive Lambeau Field experience.

Through the initiative, Wisconsin Batteries Plus locations added recycling stations and signage promoting the partnership, while an interactive booth at Lambeau Field educated fans on how to properly recycle batteries.

“This grant is a pivotal step in our mission to make battery recycling accessible and mainstream,” Batteries Plus CEO Scott Williams said at the time the partnership and grant were announced. “By eliminating recycling fees at our stores and developing advanced recycling workstations, we’re removing barriers and making it easier for consumers to do their part in preserving both our natural resources and the strength of our domestic supply chain. We’re excited to partner with the Department of Energy and the Green Bay Packers to bring this important message to a wider audience.”

Cameron McDonald, the San Antonio-based vice president and head of merchandising, planning and inventory at Batteries Plus, told conference attendees that while Batteries Plus locations previously offered recycling collection services, the company did not “amplify” those services prior to its DOE grant and Packers partnership.

“It wasn’t something that we put dollars behind to say, ‘Hey, bring us more stuff,’” McDonald said. “We were looking for a way to amplify that message further than just putting a paid social ad out there that said, ‘Hey, bring us more recycling.’ We didn’t feel like that would be all that effective.”

In addition to amplifying its message, the company’s partnership with the Packers made the battery collection program more fun and engaging, he said. “When we announced the partnership last August, it really put our brand in a spotlight and took something that a lot of our associates felt like, ‘Hey, thanks for allowing people to bring in their garbage,’ to ‘Hey, this is really cool.’”

McDonald said he started getting calls from Batteries Plus franchise owners asking about similar partnerships with their local teams. “It just created a buzz throughout the company,” he said, and made something that can be mysterious more accessible for consumers, too.

While McDonald said customers have left batteries at the doorsteps of Batteries Plus stores overnight “because people just don’t know what to do with them,” through the DOE-funded program, customers should take their batteries to the counter of their local store.

“We’re a small box store, and our associate, with a smiling face on, will collect your battery from you, educate you a little bit on it … because we don’t believe in [unattended] bins all that much at Batteries Plus; that’s just our philosophy, and so we’re proud of that,” he said.

Craig Decker, manager of corporate sales with the community-owned Green Bay Packers, added, “We don’t have one massive owner and ownership group. It’s owned by the fans. And one of the cornerstones for over the last century with our team, along with trying to have success on the football field, has been [to ask] what are ways that we can align and work with folks in the community to make a positive impact. And that’s really the cornerstone of what this partnership is about—finding a way through the megaphone of the Packers, working alongside a partner like Batteries Plus, to educate, reward and excite our fans about the challenges and opportunities that exist through recycling their batteries.”

A growing issue

While everyone generates batteries, not many people understand they can be recycled or where to recycle them, according to Dominic Brown, OEM business development director at Cirba Solutions, based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“I think once you get the awareness out there, people will recycle,” Brown said.

Cirba Solutions has served as Batteries Plus’ preferred recycling partner for nearly two decades.

Brown said while consumers can recognize the sustainability aspect of recycling batteries, they generally don’t recognize the safety aspect, including the environmental and fire risk that batteries, particularly lithium-ion, can present if improperly disposed of, nor do they understand the national security argument.

“A lot of the lithium resources are not in the U.S. Same thing with cobalt,” he said. “A lot of cobalt comes out of a lot of conflict regions. But if you can start to recycle a lot of these metals that come into the U.S. … it reduces reliance on … some of these foreign entities of concern.”

Batteries Plus has seen the volume of lithium batteries it collects grow by 10 percent, while its volume of damaged lithium batteries has grown by 20 percent, according to McDonald.

“Consumers have a very real problem on their hands and need to understand their options for safe disposal,” he said.

Moderator Shannon Crawford Gay, director of recycling and environmental policy at Houston-based WM, described the Packers-Batteries Plus partnership as a win-win.

Program pillars

McDonald said the Batteries Plus program has three pillars:

• free recycling for consumers;
• new and innovative battery sorting stations; and
• consumer participation.

To simplify the message to consumers, Batteries Plus accepts batteries of all chemistries and in all conditions, even damaged ones, he said, and the company is supplementing fixtures within its stores to handle the larger volume of batteries and ensuring associates are sorting and preparing batteries for storage and transport safely.

“We’re innovating that process as we speak, and we’re going to be rolling out some prototypes later this summer in many of our locations,” McDonald said.

When it comes to engaging consumers, the company’s research in partnership with Cirba Solutions revealed that creating behavior change through messaging is essential, not just sharing information.

“When you change behavior, then you add in habits, and so that’s really what the partnership [with the Packers] was about,” McDonald said.

The partners amplified their message through various activation events at Packers’ home games, including at a Batteries Plus-branded “Powerhouse Fan Zone.”

“This Fan Zone can be packed up and moved to any community,” McDonald said. “It educates consumers on battery recycling, the different chemistries, the different applications [and] safety.”

Decker added that the Packers focused on identifying elements that could excite fans who didn’t know about battery recycling and were connected to the team, like delivering the game ball, and the partners worked on several Packer-centric prizes for fans.

Packers fans received one entry for every battery recycled at a Batteries Plus store and one entry for every dollar spent on new products.

“That was really enticing for franchisees because they were like, ‘Well, gosh, recycling traffic can be really good for my small business,’” McDonald said, adding that it also helped make the program more economically viable for the stores as well as a good value proposition for the consumer.

The partnership succeeded in raising awareness about battery recycling that resulted in action, with McDonald noting that prior to the program’s launch, relative to the general population, 28 percent of Packers fans were likely to think it was easy to recycle batteries versus 57 percent after the activations.

He also said the partnership led to a substantial increase in the pounds collected from August of last year through March of this year, with figures to be released later this year.

“When the customer brings their recycling in, we actually have a module within our point of sale system that’s for recycling, and so we’re able to intake that recycling, tie it to their customer account with us, so we can start to track household behaviors around battery recycling and better understand how often they recycle, what types of chemistries are coming in [and] how much of it was damaged,” he said.

Adopting the playbook

The Packers, Cirba Solutions and Batteries Plus say their playbook can be adopted by other companies and organizations.

“If you have a customer-facing-type business, there’s an opportunity,” Brown said. “Not only is it the right thing to do, but there’s some win-win benefits there.”

To replicate the program, he said the first move involves partnering with a domestic battery recycler.

McDonald suggested working with partners that align with your organization’s core values and agreeing on what success looks like. “I can’t tell you how many times Craig asked me, ‘What does success look like here? What are you guys looking for, and how can we make any pivots or tweaks so that we’re getting the highest return on the investment here?’”

Decker said the model can be applied to events outside of NFL games, whether concerts, charitable functions or other sports teams. “If you can find … something that the community that you’re trying to speak to finds interest in, if you can plug into that, that’s going to naturally help raise the awareness.”

McDonald advised keeping the message simple and said accessibility should be a factor.

“If you say you accept everything, you got to be able to accept everything and do it safely,” he said.

“We’re open seven days a week. We’re within 15 minutes of about 80 percent of the U.S. population … making it extremely convenient for consumers.”

The author is editorial director of the Recycling Today Media Group and can be contacted at dtoto@gie.net.