Avon opens Colorado’s first municipal Styrofoam recycling center
Styrofoam compactor opened March 14 along with upgraded recycling center; both are open to the Eagle County public
Zoe Goldstein/Vail Daily
Avon is now the first municipality in Colorado to offer end-to-end Styrofoam recycling.
All Eagle County residents can drop off clean, white, hard Styrofoam with no tape or casing attached in the large white bin for free at the Avon Recycling Center at 371 Yoder Avenue, past the Home Depot. The drop-off bin is open 24/7, 365 days per year.
The town launched its new Styrofoam recycling program on March 14. The Avon Recycling Center reopened following renovations on the same day.
While other municipalities, like Longmont, have Styrofoam recycling programs that involve collecting the foam and partnering with private companies to compress it, Avon is the first municipality in the state to both collect and compress in-house.
The town’s public operations team, which also handles road surface maintenance, snow and ice removal and holiday tree lighting, is primarily in charge of the Styrofoam densifier machine.
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Styrofoam recycling is the next step in waste management
Last March, Charlotte Lin, Avon’s sustainability manager, received word that the town’s grant application for funding to purchase a Styrofoam densifier had been approved. Avon received $111,105 from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Recycling Resources Economic Opportunity program.
Avon has made sustainability a focus over the last few years in pursuit of the town and county’s goals to reach an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas levels from 2014 levels by 2050. While buildings and transportation make up the majority of emissions county wide, waste is also a crucial piece of the puzzle.
Avon has had a universal recycling law since November 2023 that requires all residential and commercial properties to be registered for recycling services and recycle all recyclable materials. The Styrofoam recycling program is the next step in Avon’s sustainability efforts on the waste front.
The state is also working on managing waste levels. In 2021, the state legislature passed the Plastic Pollution Reduction Act, banning most stores and retail food establishments from providing customers with single-use plastic takeaway bags and polystyrene (including Styrofoam) food containers. The law took effect in January 2024.
Avon’s recycling center upgrades started last October and were funded in equal partnership between Avon and Eagle County. The upgrades include a brand-new cardboard compactor, fresh paving and new paper product and comingled recycling bins.
How does the machine work, and why compress Styrofoam?
The Styrofoam densifier machine, from the company Foam Cycle, receives Styrofoam in the top, shreds it, heats it to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, compresses it and spits out in a stream of hot, gooey pure polystyrene plastic about three inches in diameter called a foam ingot. The heated, compressed Styrofoam can be shaped into anything — some places have made sculptures and other art forms — but Avon shapes it into blocks to fill a pallet.
Avon will then sell the foam ingots to a Colorado plastics recycler, which will reuse the ingots. Ingots can be turned into building insulation materials, picture frames and more. “It’s pretty cool as a circular economy example,” Lin said.
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Compressing the Styrofoam also saves air space in landfills, key to extending the landfills’ lifespans in mountain communities with limited opportunities for expansion.
Styrofoam blocks take up space in the landfill and do not biodegrade or disappear. Before Avon’s program, all of Eagle County’s Styrofoam was going straight to the landfill.
“Landfills have certain space, and that will determine its life span,” Lin said. “We know that our landfills have been really struggling with that air space, so I think this is going to be a really cool contribution in that sense.”
In her grant application, Lin estimated that the Styrofoam recycling program would save 4 to 8 tons of packaging Styrofoam per year, translating to approximately 6,154 to 12,307 cubic feet of conserved landfill airspace. “The volume reduction is crazy,” she said.
Lin derived her numbers using data from a private Styrofoam recycling program in Arvada that uses the same machine, one of only two other Styrofoam recycling programs in the state, both of which are private.
Pitkin County’s landfill may be nearing the end of its lifespan. As of March 2023, it was reported that the landfill only had another six years of space. Last May, a plan was put in place for an expansion that would give the landfill another 70 years of life.
In April 2022, Eagle County’s landfill in Wolcott was estimated to have another 100 years of space.
“One way to help us extend the lifespan of a landfill is to save air space, and this is definitely one way of doing that,” Lin said.
In the early stages of the program, Avon will track a significant amount of data, from the man-hours needed to operate the machine to the volume of Styrofoam compressed. “We want to make sure the operation is smooth,” Lin said.
Avon’s Styrofoam drop-off container can hold one giant bag at a time. Each bag of Styrofoam weighs about 25 pounds. It takes about 25 minutes to compress 2.5 bags of Styrofoam into the ingot box, which weighed over 50 pounds.
The Styrofoam recycling program does not accept egg cartons, food foams, squishy foam or colored foam, as the machine cannot process the first three, and the plastics recycler will not accept the latter.
More information about Avon’s Styrofoam recycling program and other sustainability initiatives can be found at Avon.org/Sustainability, or by contacting Sustainability Coordinator Charlotte Lin at clin@avon.org.
