Outdoor recreation groups hope handing out poop-disposal kits will cut down on the problem piling up on Colorado’s public lands
waste
Posted inBusiness, Environment, News, Politics and Government
Get ready for plastic and paper bag fees in Colorado — and say goodbye to styrofoam
Colorado lawmakers on Tuesday sent Gov. Jared Polis House Bill 1162, which would establish a fee for single-use products, like plastic and paper grocery bags, and let retailers keep some of the proceeds. The bill would also ban the use of styrofoam by restaurants starting in 2024. The measure has long been a priority of […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, News, Politics and Government
How bad are Coloradans at recycling? Chaffee County contractor closed its free sites over bad actors, slim profits
Angel of Shavano Recycling spent 15 years sifting through Chaffee County’s trash collecting its treasures — plastics, cardboard, paper, newspaper, tin and aluminum. But slim profits and bad behavior by customers led the owner, Mickey Barry, to close the gates on the four free community recycling sites. “In the recycling industry the drop sites have […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, News
Most used wind turbine blades end up in landfills. Colorado is part of the push to make the industry greener.
STERLING — Look north from a crest of the Logan County landfill and the wind turbines on the horizon appear like tiny pinwheels slicing bitter February gusts into a renewable and ever-larger share of Colorado’s electric power. Now gaze downward, into the chasm gradually filling with a combination of loose dirt, garbage and plastic bags […]
Posted inEnvironment, Politics and Government
Will 2020 be the year Colorado bans plastic bags, Styrofoam and other single-use plastics?
The Town of Avon did something daring in January: It banned expanded polystyrene food containers, a.k.a. Styrofoam. The move made the town the first community in Colorado to forbid such take-out food containers, which don’t do well in microwaves — or with trash recyclers. But it also put them at odds with an obscure state […]
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Colorado’s recycling rate improves to 17.2%, but we’re producing more trash than ever
Colorado’s recycling rate has dramatically improved — but read this with a giant asterisk. We’re now at 17.2% for 2018, an increase from the prior year’s 12%, according to the latest “State of Recycling in Colorado” report produced by Eco-Cycle and the Colorado Public Interest Research Group. The difference was in how household recycling was […]
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Colorado has two years to hit its 28% recycling goal. A new report shows we’re nowhere close.
With all the campaigns and eco-guilt heaped on Coloradans to recycle, the state just released new data showing that we’re still not where we want to be. The state’s recycling rate for 2018 landed at 17.2%, which is below the prior year’s 20.5%. But before anyone gets all judgy, the state’s Department of Public Health […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, News, Technology
Thousands of usable iPhones trashed by one Colorado firm because well-meaning donors forgot to turn off “Find my iPhone”
In neatly sorted stacks and bins in a warehouse in Lafayette, 3,378 smartphones and tablets are waiting to be trashed. They are all used, all donated in the past three weeks, and most are in fine working condition. There are even four Apple iPhone Xs. But this batch of iPhones and iPads won’t join the […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, News
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 […]
Posted inBusiness, Coloradans, Environment, Health, News, Politics and Government
Recycling can be a hard sell in rural Colorado. That hasn’t discouraged a resourceful nonprofit effort in tiny Swink.
SWINK — Dee Hostetler walks through the quiet, cavernous brick building past pallets stacked high with translucent, kaleidoscopic bales of recycled plastic that filter the morning light like stained glass. The hollowed-out remains of this former Holly Sugar factory, all 27,000 square feet of it, stands just a block off the short strand of U.S. […]