Why We Recycle

Silver City Recycles is a nonprofit benefit corporation dedicated to reduce waste and promoting community involvement in Grant County, New Mexico. Our priorities include:

• Reducing waste deposited in landfills
• Researching resource conservation
• Educating the public about ways to reduce consumer waste
• Increasing the demand for recycled products
• Innovating through the reuse and repurposing of waste materials
• Promoting networking between different recycling-based businesses
• Incubating new recycling-based businesses

The Town of Silver City terminated single-stream recycling in July, 2019, leaving residents with no option but to dispose nearly all their waste in the trash, where it was then buried in the Grant County landfill. A group of Silver City residents took action, aiming to develop ways to recover and find new uses for plastics, paper and glass at a local level. Collaborating with the Town, for-profit enterprises and local organizations, the group raised money to purchase a plastic extrusion machine that uses crushed glass and plastic bottles to create construction materials such as paving bricks.

The groups also partnered with Future Forge to develop a small-scale glass crusher to repurpose glass bottles into a variety of products, including bricks, glass beads and sand.