Eco-Cycle

Recycling of materials from commercial and residential collections for the benefit of the community and the environment. Also, education of the community concerning the importance of recycling and composting, and zero waste as a climate solution. Processed and marketed roughly 55,000 tons of single-stream recyclable materials and millions of pounds of hard-to recycle materials from commercial and residential sectors; collected recyclables and organic waste from hundreds of boulder county businesses; conducted over 1,800 environmental education presentations impacting over 43,000 students and teachers in 3 public school districts; educated over 1,000 community members in benefits of recycling and composting and engaged them in our community carbon farming campaign and adoption of statewide policies to expand recycling access and endmarkets in colorado.eco-cycle led a major coalition effort to successfully pass hb22-1355, producer responsibility for recycling legislation, making Colorado the 3rd state in the country to adopt this transformational policy to expand and pay for recycling access statewide. Our multi-year effort to establish a circular economy development center paid off with the passage of hb22-1159, which will facilitate end markets for recyclable materials in Colorado. Eco-Cycle worked with local farmers, landowners, and allied groups to implement on-farm compost pilot projects to make and use compost, demonstrating aerated static pile technology, testing value-added compost types, and trialing wood chip composting as a fire mitigation/recovery tool.our schools program continued to adapt our preschool-12th grade school programming to accommodate the ongoing impacts of covid-19 during the 21-22 school year, providing live-virtual delivery as well as providing in-person and outdoor presentations on a wide range of environmental education topics. We added 4 new schools to our green star schools program, which implements integrated recycling and composting programming, reaching a total of 59 public schools, and completed the production of our zero waste schools guide to export the model of our award-winning school program across the country. Eco-Cycle implemented new, more-accessible signage at our center for hard to recycle materials facility with more graphics and spanish subtitles, and expanded the materials we collect to include batteries, smoke detectors, and glassware. We secured funding to purchase the country's first-ever electric compost collections truck, and conducted five "equity hard-to-recycle collection events" in low-income neighborhoods in partnership with the city of boulder. Our business department piloted a successful polybag collection project with retailers in downtown boulder, which we will now expand and use to create a model for other outdoor industry retailers to reduce and recycle plastics. We continued to successfully operate the boulder county recycling center through the ongoing challenges of covid-19 and further increased wages for sorters and operators.we more deeply incorporated equity into our work by raising wages for the least paid employees in the organization, expanding our board of directors to become a more representative and inclusive organization, integrating equity arguments about impacts of plastic production and disposal in campaign materials, and working in coalition with equity leaders such as the green latinos on statewide legislation and a successful multi-year effort to get denver to adopt an expanded waste services program to provide universal, residential, volume-based-pricing for recycling and composting. Eco-Cycle continued to provide numerous tools for Colorado communities including completing a data collection project for the Colorado department of public health and the environment to assess recycling and composting progress by local governments, and releasing our annual 2021 state of Colorado recycling report with copirg and our Eco-Cycle recycling guide for boulder county. Eco-Cycle engaged more deeply in zero waste policy discussions at the national level as co-founders of the alliance of mission based recyclers (ambr) and as members of the u.s. plastics pact to drive national messaging on how to rebuild and expand authentic recycling and reduce unnecessary single-use plastics.