Fifty Years of Proving What’s Possible
It started with a few community members and a fleet of old school buses. In 1976, a small group of Boulder residents looked at the way society was wasting our planet’s natural resources. Rather than waiting for “someone” to fix it, they decided to create a solution themselves—an alternative to the “business as usual” system of discarding used materials.
Buying retired school buses and staffing them with volunteers, they drove across the community to collect paper, glass, and aluminum from the curbs of neighbors willing to try something different from the trash can.
That grassroots spark caught on and eventually grew into the state’s first (and the nation’s largest) outdoor recycling facility, where 40,000 tons of resources were collected and sorted each year, despite high winds and snowstorms. It was the birth of Colorado’s first curbside recycling program—powered by people, by community.
Over the past five decades, we’ve built new recovery systems, developed local markets, and championed the most progressive Zero Waste policies in Colorado’s history. We recover these natural resources to protect the ones still standing—and we do it in partnership with a community willing to step forward with us.
And we’re not finished. The next chapter is already underway.
Be part of what’s next!
- See how we make change, together
- Learn more about our history
- See upcoming events below, and share your story with us
