A lot changes in 75 years.

Those who grew up playing on the then-small-town streets of Longmont, Colorado in 1948 have grown up and had children and grandchildren of their own. As they have watched their family grow, expand and develop, they have also watched their city expand and flourish.

In the 1950 census, there were a little more than 8,000 people in Longmont. That is less than 10 percent of today’s population of just over 100,000 residents.

World War II had just ended, Longmont and its residents were just recovering and the City began its Waste Services program, a service that has continued and itself expanded through the last three-quarters of a century.

“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.

Waste Services began with trash collection and a local landfill.  Over the years, the service expanded and modernized with the population and the awareness to recycle.  During the 1970s, a national awareness of the amount of waste generated throughout the United States swept the country, as well as the impacts on the environment from these materials. In 1979, the City of Longmont collaborated with Eco-Cycle to begin a curbside recycling program. Over time as consumer products and materials evolved, the city service changed to meet the community’s needs.

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.

With a commitment to serving the community and environmental stewardship, the City made the following improvements over the years:

• 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 across the nation and in Colorado revolves around reducing material to landfills and reuse, reduce and recycling. This encompasses 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.

Longmont is a great place to live, work and play. Help the City continue to be a steward of our environment and do our part to make Longmont a clean and safe place to be!  Make sure to sign up for the Waste Services App to receive notifications of your collection days and special collection events.  We also offer the Waste Wizard, your complete resource to Recycle it Right!

Here is to another 75 years!