Alpine Waste & Recycling shut down its Denver recycling facility for a month to retrofit the plant with new technology and equipment. When it reopened in the middle of March, the $2.5 million investment proved to be 33 percent faster at sorting paper from cardboard, aluminum cans from yogurt containers and juice cartons from plastic-lined […]
Alpine Waste & Recycling
Why Styrofoam — amid all of Colorado’s recycling struggles — is being targeted for extinction
Styrofoam is the bane of any environmentalist’s leftover lunch. But even as some Colorado cities have tried to ban and food stores — including McDonald’s — have ditched polystyrene foam in favor of more sustainable containers, it hasn’t gone away. It’s time, said Sen. Dominick Moreno, a Democrat in Commerce City who is pushing a […]
Meet the robots and other contraptions making Colorado’s recycling more efficient
Clarke may be a little stiff, but he picks out milk and juice cartons from a pile of moving trash better than any man or woman at the Altogether Recycling plant in Adams County. The discriminating robot, named after sci-fi icon Arthur C. Clarke, can also work all day and night, if necessary. In another […]
Colorado’s largest recycling company — finally — will be able to recycle Starbucks and other coffee cups
Alpine Waste & Recycling, Colorado’s largest recycling company, has figured out what to do with the perfect cup of coffee: Recycle it. Starting as early as Oct. 1, the company will begin picking up paper cups from coffee shops and household customers and transport them to a Wisconsin mill for proper recycling. The deal makes […]
Recycling in Colorado is tedious, cost-prohibitive, voluntary — and evolving
Brent Hildebrand, a vice president at Alpine Waste & Recycling, sets on a table a mangled piece of metal. In a previous life, it was a horseshoe. “That little piece of metal caused our equipment to be down for a couple of hours. That’s huge for us. We just couldn’t find it, it was so […]