What We Offer

Eco-Cycle, established in 1976 as Colorado’s first recycler, brings fifty years of experience in advancing resource reduction, reuse, recycling, composting, and resource recovery across Colorado and beyond. We offer consulting services on a wide variety of topics, working with our expert staff to develop a custom approach for your community. Our comprehensive approach—combining policy development with community education and engagement—ensures that circular systems are practical, scalable, and widely adopted.

Throughout our long history of mission-driven services, we have engaged with clients across all sectors, including governments, businesses, schools, residents, and recycling and compost service providers. Our team has a proven track record of defining and implementing solutions that increase waste diversion and activate communities to participate in their local recycling, composting, and reuse systems.

We want to work with your community to build circular systems!

Policy Development and Implementation

We have direct experience developing and implementing policies and programs with local governments that drive increased waste diversion and progress toward a circular economy for residents and businesses. This includes:

• Pay-As-You-Throw ordinances
• Universal Recycling and Zero Waste ordinances
• Equal Space ordinances
• Organized residential hauling contracts
• Plastic pollution reduction policies
• Compost use and procurement policies
• Construction and deconstruction policies
• Programs to incentivize businesses to recycle, compost, or reuse

Community Engagement

We focus on all sectors of the community and build from the ground up. One of Eco-Cycle’s foundational models is our use of Community-Based Social Marketing principles to mobilize residents, businesses, and local governments. We focus on fostering behavior change by developing champions within every sector of the community—training these advocates to educate and inspire their peers, creating ripple effects that spread sustainable practices widely. This grassroots approach goes beyond traditional outreach by better understanding and removing barriers, enhancing motivators, and building social norms that support waste diversion and Zero Waste goals.

Recycling, Composting, Hard-to-Recycle, and Reuse Infrastructure and Operations

As operators of recycling, composting, and hard-to-recycle facilities and promoters of reuse, we bring decades of experience and lessons learned for efficient operations, spreading education and awareness, finding end markets, and bringing in customers. 

• Recycling Center: With our fifty years of experience running recycling collections for businesses in Boulder County, and decades operating a materials recovery facility (MRF), we have more hands-on recycling experience than any other organization in Colorado. We operate and market materials daily, giving us a unique, firsthand understanding of what works—and what doesn’t—when it comes to both processing materials and educating the public.
• Compost Projects: Our compost program is demonstrating and promoting local compost processing and marketing of finished compost. We also collect compost material from businesses and deliver it to a regional composter. 
• Hard-to-Recycle Drop-Off Center: As the creator and operator of the first-of-its-kind Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHaRM), we are a national leader in developing socially and environmentally responsible solutions for hard-to-recycle materials, with a core model focused on developing local partnerships that amplify community impact.
• Reuse Hub: Eco-Cycle has partnered with the City of Boulder to launch the Reuse Hub for Boulder and Beyond. This online program provides businesses with resources that offer reuse options and give residents an interactive map to easily find and use local reuse services. The hub is designed to strengthen reuse systems throughout the community and make participation accessible, straightforward, and more of a societal norm.

Eco-Cycle is well connected with all sectors of the waste, recycling, and composting industries through our work on multiple Recycle Colorado committees and councils, including the Board, Policy Committee, the Greater Colorado Council, the Northern Colorado Council, the Construction & Deconstruction Council, and the Colorado Composting Council. 

Our Experience

Eco-Cycle has, for decades, worked on circular economy projects. Most recently, we have provided technical expertise for the state’s Colorado Circular Community’s (C3) Strategic Technical Expertise for the Public Sector (STEPS) program. Eco-Cycle has provided consulting and Zero Waste services on subjects ranging from developing new recycling, compost, and reuse infrastructure, to implementing local policies and best ways to educate and engage the community for a wide range of clients within the state, including:

• Adams 12 Five Star Schools: waste diversion action plan
• Arvada: waste diversion action plan
• Boulder: universal Zero Waste ordinance, multifamily outreach and education
• Boulder County: community-wide Zero Waste education, community-based social marketing
• Brighton: policy recommendations for a municipally contracted hauling program and hauler licensing ordinance
• Broomfield: communications and engagement around roll-out of municipally-contracted hauling program
• Centennial: waste diversion action plan
• Denver: community-based social marketing, compost education, Pay-As-You-Throw policy development
• Durango: policy recommendations for increasing composting
• Eagle: guidance for codifying Town use of locally produced compost
• Englewood: waste diversion action plan
• Erie: policy recommendations for a municipally contracted hauling program and hauler licensing ordinance
• Fort Collins: policy recommendations for increasing composting
• Fort Lupton: policy recommendations for a municipally contracted hauling program and hauler licensing ordinance
• Lafayette: compost education, universal recycling ordinance
• Lakewood: single-hauler contracting
• Littleton: waste diversion action plan
• Longmont: education and outreach campaign
• Louisville: community-based social marketing
• Lyons: education and outreach campaign
• Sheridan: waste diversion action plan
• Steamboat Springs: policy recommendations for hauler licensing and codifying City use of locally produced compost

We can help your community with:

• Recycling operations, marketing, and collections
• Education and outreach
• Organics diversion
• Hard-to-recycle materials
• Circularity education in schools
• Underresourced and underrepresented communities
• Infrastructure
• Policy development
• Reuse