As Longmont marks 75 years of its Waste Services program, City Council is highlighting some of the growth and improvements made since the city was less than 10 percent of today’s population.
“In 1948, Our City leaders had the forethought to create waste collection service to benefit the community and its environment,” said Charles Kamenides, Waste Services manager, in a news release.
The program, which initially launched trash collection and local landfill service, expanded and modernized over the decades to include curbside recycling collection.
“With support and direction from the Longmont City Council, Waste Services began to evolve offering new programs and services and working to meet the needs of its residents and their waste with a focus on sustainability and environmental stewardship,” the release says.
Improvements include:
• 1999 – Began automated dual-stream recycling for easier customer use and a more efficient and safe operation for our collection teams.
• Early 2000’s – Constructed the Longmont Recycling Center in the early 2000s, which gave residents the opportunity to drop off additional recycling materials such as bulky cardboard, metal, tree branches and yard waste at no additional cost to Longmont residents.
• 2008 – Longmont City Council passed its first Zero Waste Resolution in 2008 declaring itself a zero waste community and encourages the pursuit of zero waste as a long-term goal to eliminate waste and pollution.
• 2008 – Started in partnership with EcoCycle to roll out the Green Star School education program to schools in Longmont
• 2010 – Began single-stream recycling with regional approaches to recycling collection
• 2017 – Initiated the opt- in curbside organics collection program and started the every other week trash collection option
• 2017 – Launched the Waste Services app and Waste Wizard offering 24/7 access to their collection schedules, notifications of schedule changes and special collection events and the Waste Wizard search engine that provides guidance to everyone’s recycling questions.
• 2018 – City of Longmont developed a natural gas extraction project to capture methane and greenhouse gas from the Wastewater Treatment Plant to fuel the sanitation trucks.
• 2022 – Updated the Zero Waste Resolution with the more aggressive goals to divert 75 percent of waste collected city- wide by 2035 and 95 percent by 2050
• 2023 – Passed the Universal Recycling Ordinance.The ordinance will ensure recycling is available to all businesses and residents within the City of Longmont, which will help make the community and the City a cleaner and safer place.
Where is Longmont Waste Services headed for the next 75 years?
The future of waste collection in Colorado involves the need to reuse, reduce and recycle, including many of the day-to-day items that affect households and businesses. Locally, the future may hold a regional approach to our waste management and services provided to the community, specifically, hard-to-recycle items, household chemical disposal and organics.
Regionally, extended producer responsibility legislation will place the responsibility of the life cycle of packaging materials on the producer of the product and create a financial opportunity for waste haulers to collect recycling and ultimately provide recycling services more universally across Colorado.
We will see the development of the Circular Economy Development Center in Colorado. Circular Economy is a process that receives and remanufactures our recycling materials here in Colorado, creating the market for the material, creating jobs and ultimately reducing the transportation “carbon footprint” to haul recycle commodities across the country or overseas.
The public is urged to sign up for the Waste Services App to receive notifications of waste collection days and special events.
