Western Disposal is much more than a trash hauler.
Many of our customers have been with us twenty or even thirty years, and we started our relationship with the customer putting all of their discards in a trash receptacle and Western Disposal emptying it and taking it to a landfill. Now, there are only a few customers who don’t have recyclables collection service from us as well as trash collection service. Many of our customers utilize our compostables collection service in addition to our recyclables and trash collection services. Western, and our customers, have come a long way in the last thirty years in how waste is handled. We realized that the name Western Disposal, while known to thousands of customers, was no longer descriptive of all that we do; therefore, we have added GreenSmart to our logo to better describe who we are and what we do in the community.
What is GreenSmart? It is knowing what your options are, what the associated costs are and making an informed decision about how to handle your waste stream.
At our core, Western Disposal is a transportation company. We are different from most transportation companies, however, in that we generally collect from the same customers each week, and we deliver the materials we collect to fixed destinations. We are different from most trash haulers in that we have embraced the concepts of managing the waste stream in a more environmentally conscious manner and of providing our customers with many options for handling their waste.
Western Disposal offers an array of containers, collection services and environmentally friendly destination options for the materials that you want removed from your home, business or construction site. Making a thoughtful decision about how to take advantage of these options is being GreenSmart.
Destinations:
The first step in being able to make a GreenSmart decision, is to know what destinations are available for your materials. Western has worked with local governments and other businesses for decades to make the following options available to the community.
The following destinations are available for your materials:
- Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs). These are facilities where recyclable materials are prepared for market and then shipped to the plants where they are used to manufacture new products. Western delivers all of the residential recyclables that we collect to the Boulder County Recyclables Processing Facility in Boulder, Colorado. Most of the commercial recyclables collected are delivered to Western’s own processing facility located at our Trash and Recycle Center in Boulder Colorado.
- Composting Facilities. Western Disposal operates a State of Colorado approved composting facility on 63rd Street in Boulder, Colorado, where organic materials are ground, placed in open windrows and composted for reuse in the community.
- Center for Hard to Recycle Materials (ChARM). This facility, a partnership between by Eco-Cycle and the City of Boulder, accepts a wide range of materials that are not typically accepted at MRFs. Western can arrange transportation of your materials from your home or business facility to the ChARM.
- Electronics Drop-Off Sites: Electronic equipment, including computers printers, calculators, televisions, etc. is accepted at several facilities in the area including the ChARM Center and Western’s Trash and Recycle Center. Western can arrange transportation of your electronic materials from your house or business to one of these facilities.
- Wood-waste and Yard-waste Drop-Off Centers: Western operates dimensional lumber wood-waste and yard-waste drop-off centers for the City of Boulder and Boulder County at its Trash and Recycle Center at 5880 Butte Mill Road. We can arrange transportation of materials to either of these facilities.
- Metals and appliance recyclers: These are facilities that specialize in reclaiming metals and sending them back to mills to be remade into new metal. Much of the metal delivered to our Trash and Recycle Center is sent to metals’ recyclers.
- Trash and Recycle Center. Western Disposal is unique among local haulers in that we have our own transfer station where applying more management to the waste stream is possible. Western’s Trash and Recycle Center is home to the Boulder County Household Hazardous Waste Drop-Off Facility, the City of Boulder and Boulder County Yard-Waste Drop-Off facility and the City of Boulder Wood-Waste Drop-Off Facility. It is a focus point in the community where waste materials can be segregated for delivery to different destinations. Each day we pull materials from the trash stream and send them to be reused or recycled, rather than landfilled.
- Landfills: For those items that cannot be taken anywhere else, Western delivers materials to the landfills located in Erie, Colorado. Those landfills were built in compliance with State of Colorado regulations and are inspected regularly by the State for environmental compliance.
Materials:
The second step in making a GreenSmart decision is to know what materials can be delivered to the various final destinations. Following are the items that Western Disposal can collect from you and deliver to appropriate destinations other than landfills.
MRFs (Material Recycling Facilities)
- Wood fibers:
Stapled magazines and catalogs
Newspapers & their inserts (discard plastic bags)
Corrugated cardboard & brown paper bags
Paperboard (cereal, shoe & gift boxes, flat sheet cardboard from tablets)
Envelopes (with or without windows)
Paper—letterhead, fax & computer
Legal pads & wire-spiral notebooks
Six- or twelve-pack paper cartons.
- Containers:
Metal jar lids & bottle caps
Paper milk cartons & drink boxes
Glass bottles & jars of all colors
Screw-topped plastic bottles with#1 or #2 on the bottom remove & discard plastic bottle caps)
Composting Facilities
- Organics:
Some papers which are not otherwise recyclable
Electronic Drop-Off Sites
- Electronic Wastes:
Uninterruptible Power Supplies
Small electronics such as PDAs, Gameboys, video game systems
Trash and Recycle Center
- Construction Waste (for further sorting):
Metals Recycling
Center for Hard to Recycle Items
- Other:
Big durable #2 plastics (These are the big toys, like Big Wheels, etc.)
#6 white block foam packaging
Landfills
If there is nowhere else for it to go, we can collect your materials as trash and deliver them to a landfill.
Containers:
The third step in making a GreenSmart decision is to determine how to make the segregation of materials convenient.
We believe an important part of our service, once you have determined how much space you have available, is providing you with the right container for your needs. Western Disposal has containers as small as 32-gallons in size up to 42-yards in size (that is 262 times bigger than a 32-gallon container). We also have access to specialized containers that you may need for your particular application. Let our Sales and Customer Service employees help you select the right containers for your materials.
Collection:
The fourth step in making a GreenSmart decision is to know what collection options are available and what they cost. Western has collection services available to fit everyone’s needs.
We provide:
- Regularly scheduled collection, such as you have at your home or business. Generally, regularly scheduled customers use a container they received from Western to accumulate and set out their materials for collection. These services include refuse, recyclables and compostables collection services at homes, businesses and construction sites.
- On-call service is when we set up a service for you and you call when you need materials picked up. Generally, these customers use containers provided by Western and then call us when the containers need to be emptied.
- Special collection service. This service is provided by special arrangement with us. Typically, we send a truck and one or more employees to collect materials and deliver them to an appropriate destination. We may or may not be providing containers for this service.
The costs of collection include the cost of vehicles, employees, fuel and fees at destination sites. The lowest costs per visit are incurred for our regularly scheduled services. The more materials we pick up for delivery to a particular destination, the less it costs per unit collected. For instance, it costs less per unit collected to have weekly collection of refuse and recyclables at your house than it does to have a special pickup of concrete going to a concrete reclamation site. We are here, however, to provide you the service that you want. If you would like a single computer monitor picked up at your home and delivered to an electronics collection site, we will do that for you.
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