Recycling Stories

By most accounts, the City of Novi, located in southeast Michigan, is a first class community, with great neighborhoods and parks, outstanding schools, and a well-run city government. In 2015, however, city leaders realized that its solid waste and recycling system no longer fully met the needs of the community and didn’t comport with best…

How did a county recycling program in a remote rural area become one of the most comprehensive, successful systems in the state and a key asset in the economy of the Tip of the Mitt? When Emmet County took over recycling from a local nonprofit in the late 1980s, recycling was sorely underdeveloped – as…

Recycling has become a valued public service that provides many economic, environmental, and public health benefits to communities and their residents. Several capital area communities, including Lansing and East Lansing, provide comprehensive recycling services and more would like to provide similar services. The Capital Region Recycling Initiative (CRRI) developed out of local government interest in…

Composting may not seem like the type of disruptive high-tech venture that would get Silicon Valley’s attention, but Holland-based Cocoa Compost Corporation captured top prize at the 14th Annual Global Technology Symposium this October. Cocoa Compost is turning organic waste into a rich compost that West Michigan farmers are using as a substitute for commercial…

BarFly was founded by Mark Sellers in 2008 after opening HopCat in Grand Rapids and is the parent company of HopCat, Stella’s Lounge, Grand Rapids Brewing Company, and The Waldron Public House, all restaurants and bars in Michigan and across the Midwest. In 2013, Autumn Sands, then a bartender at the Grand Rapids Brewing Company,…

Ann Arbor has been a recycling leader in Michigan since the late 1970s. The nonprofit Ecology Center opened the state’s first recycling drop-off center in 1971. Recycle Ann Arbor began the first curbside collection program in the state in 1978. Ann Arbor city government embraced and began to support both functions in the early 1980s.…