[bouldercouncilhotline] Hotline: Zero-Waste by the Numbers

[cmosupport at bouldercolorado.gov]

Sender: Young, Mary


Dear Colleagues and Hotline Fans,

On Thursday, October 15 from 5-8 pm, the city will host a free event at eTown Hall as part of a celebration of universal recycling and composting.

Boulder residents divert 59.5% of their waste, but . . . when you look at the numbers (jpg attached) it is evident that we can do much, much better.

*Boulder generates waste at a per capita rate of 1.2 tons, CU is at .14 and the City of Lafayette at .17. Yes, these numbers differ by an order of magnitude!

*Boulder's total tons of waste is 121,690, 40.5% of this total equals 49,284 tons, that's more than the 38,106 total tons of waste generated by the City of Longmont!

A few weeks ago, I shared the attached table with Boulder resident Alex Hyde-Wright and he graciously made the following suggestions (thank you Alex):


Thinking about my own household, our recycling is collected every other week, but our trash is collected every week.  Our recycling is almost always completely full, but we always have excess capacity in our trash can.  Is it possible to explore more frequent collection of recycling? 

>From when I lived in Seattle, recycling was free (and essentially unlimited) and you could reduce the size of your trash can (and your bill) all the way down to a 12 gallon bin.  It looks like in Boulder you can only go down to a 32 gallon bin.  It would seem that offering smaller bins and lower rates provides a good incentive to reduce trash and recycle more.

One area that could probably use a huge improvement is the apartment complexes in Boulder, and in particular the apartment complexes near CU that house lots of students.  Thinking back to my old apartment complex, we had two huge dumpsters that were impossible to distinguish between trash and recycling.  They were the same color, the signs on the them had long since faded, and even if you wanted to recycle, there was no way of knowing which was which.  From my anecdotal experience visiting friends at other apartment complexes, this seemed to be unfortunately common.  While it is probably always going to be more challenging with apartments due to the communal nature (and thus diffused responsibility), this certainly seems like an area where the City can take a more active role.


Mary Dolores Young
Boulder City Council Member
303-501-2439

"All ethics . . . rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts . . ." - Aldo Leopold
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