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:

• Diverting waste from landfills. See “Why Landfill Diversion is Critical“
• Innovating through the reuse and repurposing of waste materials
• Educating the public about ways to reduce consumer waste and fostering more sustainable and responsible waste management practices in general
• Promoting networking between different recycling-based businesses
• Researching resource conservation
• Increasing the demand for recycled products
• Incubating new recycling-based businesses

The Town of Silver City terminated single-stream recycling in July, 2019, due to the worldwide collapse of the recycling market. This in turn was caused by China’s refusal to purchase recyclables from other countries due to the large amount of garbage being shipped to them.

As a result, Silver City residents were left with no option but to dispose of all waste in the trash, which is ultimately 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. In addition, consumer-sorted materials could be sold into the small yet growing domestic recycling market. In the years since our inception in 2020, this market has continued to grow, allowing us to find buyers for our local recyclable materials.

The group also partnered with Future Forge to develop a small-scale glass crusher with the hope of repurposing glass bottles and jars into a variety of products. Crushed glass, available at no cost to Silver City residents, can be used in landscaping and as aggregate in concrete mixes.