WESTCLIFFE — The first thing Joanie Liebman wants to do is show off the recycling center at the Custer County landfill.
“We’ve been told by the state and other people that come down here from the recycling world that we’ve got the most pristine, well-organized, clean facility that they’ve seen anywhere. So we’re very proud of it,” Liebman said.
“It’s beautiful,” a man sitting next to Liebman affirmed.
Almost anywhere but Westcliffe the inquiry might seem odd, but residents of the remote, 400-person town have put in years of effort to make sure they have a place to send their recycling. And Liebman is particularly invested in the recycling center’s appearance — it’s called the Joanie Liebman Recycling Center, after all.
“But we call it the JLRC so I don’t get too embarrassed,” she said.
The latest in the town’s decadeslong recycling effort is what they’re calling the trailer art project. In January, Custer County purchased 13 used horse trailers to haul recyclable materials to the JLRC, which opened in 2022.
When Westcliffe received the trailers they were bent, broken and rusted through. A small group that included Deb Adams, board member for the local nonprofit High Country Recycling, Kim Townsend, an artist and local gallerist, and Liebman, raised $9,000 from the Rawlings Foundation and the local Rotary Club to beautify the trailers.
In the spring, a Future Farmers of America class worked on sanding and priming the trailers, then handed them off to local muralists and kids groups, guided by Townsend, to paint the trailers during the summer. High Country Recycling held its final community painting day Sept. 14. A group of local Amish kids, a group from 4-H and local painter Molly Parkes painted three of the trailers.
Ensuring the town has a way to recycle isn’t just the environmentally responsible thing to do, it’s also a way to keep trash costs down by extending the life of the Custer County landfill, Liebman said.
“It’s the last extension, there is no more land that we can add to that landfill,” she said. “So once that landfill is filled up, Waste Management or someone is going to come in, and prices are going to go way up. It’s going to be really difficult to get rid of trash.”
“But we’ll all be dead by then,” Adams, from High Country Recycling, chimed in.
“We will be,” Liebman laughed. “But they won’t be, they’ll be around,” Liebman said, pointing at the kids working on the trailers.
A rural recycling effort
From 1998 until 2020 Westcliffe residents were able to recycle newspaper, aluminum, tin and glass through a low-cost recycling program run by the Upper Arkansas Area Council of Governments, a coalition of county and municipal governments that stretches from Leadville to south of Westcliffe.
During that time, in 2006, Liebman helped form High Country Recycling, a nonprofit that educates people about what, how and where to recycle. Through the nonprofit, Liebman secured a grant to purchase a used cardboard baler for the county, an especially important piece of equipment for a town like Westcliffe, where the nearest Walmart is an hour away in Cañon City.
“In a rural and remote area like this, so many people shop on Amazon, Chewy and use Walmart delivery. So there is an overload of deliveries of corrugated cardboard,” Liebman said.
So far this year, Custer County has collected 130 bales of cardboard, or about 156,000 pounds’ worth.
The grant also paid for a full-time recycling staff person, solar panels and a Material Recycling Facility at the landfill where the baler could be housed. Like most of the town’s recycling efforts, the new facility was built almost entirely by volunteers, and insulated using three layers of baled cardboard.
“None of the walls are straight,” Liebman said.
In 2020, the Upper Arkansas Council ended its recycling program, and Westcliffe lost its ability to recycle anything but cardboard. Liebman applied for another Recycling Recovery and Economic Opportunity Grant through the state to build a new facility at the landfill that could process steel and aluminum cans, mixed paper and more cardboard. It took a year for the town to receive the grant, and another year to build the facility.
In the meantime, local volunteers filled up horse trailers full of recyclable goods and hauled them up to Poncha Springs, about an hour northwest of Westcliffe, to the privately owned Angel of Shavano recycling center.
But then Angel of Shavano closed, too, in April 2021. At the time Chaffee County agreed to pick up the slack for its residents, but the closure left Custer County high and dry, until the Joanie Liebman Recycling Center opened in 2022.
What about glass? What about plastic?
So far, the recycling facility is “in the black” when it comes to its cardboard, can and paper recycling, said Adams, who also acts as treasurer for High Country Recycling. The revenue comes from a combination of selling the materials — the county has generated about $20,000 from sales so far this year — and state rebates that pay for the mileage to drop off the baled goods in Pueblo.
Glass is another story. At the moment, residents toss their glass into a 20-yard trailer known around town as “big blue,” then High Country Recycling pays a hauler $1,180 to drive the glass to a facility in Broomfield once a month. Last year High Country Recycling raised $14,000 in end-of-year donations to pay for the glass recycling for the year.
As for plastic, well, no one seems to know what to do with it anymore. For about a decade High Country Recycling sent plastics to Roots Recycling in Pueblo, but increasing costs from Roots Recycling made the service untenable. Pueblo’s Recycle Works also stopped accepting anything except clear #1 plastic onsite. The town’s current status can be summed up in three words: “A real challenge!” Adams said.
For now, the horse trailers are evenly divided between a dirt patch on the northwest side of Westcliffe and a lot behind the dog park on the east end of Silver Cliff, the town next door.
The group spent its full $9,000 budget on paint supplies and a pizza party for the Future Farmers of America class that primed the trailers. “Actually, we went 46 cents over,” Adams said. Now they’re turning their attention to raising funds for the glass recycling program, so they can continue to haul big blue to Broomfield.
“Recycling has always been a community effort here,” Liebman said. “It’s not like in the big city where you have curbside. Everybody’s got to pull together to make it happen.”