ReCommunity Recycling

It’s a natural reflex. You finish a container of orange juice, or finish reading the newspaper, and with the flick of your wrist, it goes in the trash. The problem is, you're not just throwing away a product, you’re throwing away a valuable resource. You’re throwing away a future product, a future job, future revenue — an opportunity to make a difference in our communities. Instead, with the simple act of throwing that item into the recycling bin, you start a simple and profound revolution; a “recovery revolution”. By your own actions, you are helping our community, your family, our environment and our economic future. At ReCommunity, recycling is about much more than collecting and processing tons of aluminum cans, plastic bottles and reams of paper. We believe in the restorative power of recycling and what it can do to build jobs, to build revenue and to build a future for our communities. 

Who we are

• What if – everything we purchased, everything we used, everything we considered to be trash and a liability, was actually a resource that has great value?

• What if – we built a nationally-scaled enterprise based on creating total resource recovery solutions and long-term partnerships with the communities we serve?

• What if – we were committed to discovering and developing the most innovative ways to increase recycling participation?

• What if – we pledged to move as close to zero-waste as technologically possible?

The mission starts with a vision.

At first glance, the tons of valuable resources we process at our facilities may look like ordinary trash to the naked eye. What you are really doing is transforming raw materials that manufacturers use to create the products we use every day. Discarded paper becomes eco-friendly home insulation. PET and HDPE bottles become fresh new bottles or carpeting and clothing. Aluminum cans and containers can be infinitely recycled as cans over and over again, saving 95 percent of the energy it takes to harvest Bauxite ore, the raw material for virgin aluminum.

We are proactively and effectively extracting these resources from what others see as a waste stream (and we see as a resource stream) to preserve the ecology, economy and efficiencies in our communities.

Think Small. Act Big.
When you think about it; what we're really doing is capturing molecules that we can then recycle and reuse over and over again. The items we recover aren’t just bottles and plastics and paper; they are a collection of carbon molecules that we’re diverting from the landfill and productively repurposing them back into our manufacturing and community economies.

Resources. Recovery. Revenue.
With innovative people, processes and technologies, we are building a market-leading natural resource company, enabling united communities to transform their waste into valuable resource assets for economic, social and environmental value. We share the value we create with our community partners (state and local governments and businesses) in a manner that builds enduring and sustainable relationships. Our long-term goal is to recover all resources and direct them to their highest financial return and best environmental use for our community partners and over time, moving away from the need for landfills.Our mission, driving strategy and Company name all convey a single idea; we serve communities.

Others call it waste. We call it a wasted opportunity.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, our country has thrived within an industrial-economic model that's allowed us to modernize. While this has helped us thrive with groundbreaking technological advances, the byproduct of that model has been a cumbersome and rapidly expanding waste stream. As we approach a global population of nine billion people, we find ourselves in a world of constrained commodities, reduced traditional energy reserves, overflowing landfills and shifting options. Every year, communities across America throw away millions of tons of aluminum, plastics, paper and other valuable resources that can be recycled or reused, turned into new products or made into green fuel. Up to 90 percent of trash goes into landfills; where it threatens our air, land and water and does not grow our economy. The first step in changing this trajectory is changing our perspective. 

How we work. A new perspective on recycling.
ReCommunity works with our community partners to recover discarded natural resources destined for landfills and convert them into clean, efficient and cost-competitive commodities, products and energy. We enable our community partners to generate additional revenue, recover community-owned resources, create new jobs, fund budget shortfalls and reduce their carbon footprint.Together we’re building a community of shared responsibilities, shared benefits and shared values to find new ways to recover, recycle and reinvest these valuable resources back into our communities.

Here’s how our new perspective has a positive impact:
The environment

Our people and facilities create an impressive reduction in landfill usage, environmental waste and pollution. For example, the 1.8 million tons of material processed through ReCommunity Recycling facilities last year reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 5.3 million metric tons — the same as having +960,000 fewer cars on the road. 

Recycling. Rebuilding. Rethinking.

On our road to a zero waste vision there are a host of efforts, investments and commitments to innovation and technology. These commitments include; (i) conversion of dual stream recycling into single stream technology, (ii) more, larger, more convenient and innovative new recycling bins, (iii) new ways to secure active recycling behavior at home, at work and in our schools and (iv) green transformational energy technologies that will covert that part of the waste stream that is not recycled as commodities into environmentally-friendly energy feedstocks.

We are always rethinking conventional recycling and our role in building more vibrant American communities in the process. We know first-hand there is economic-social-environmental power in recovering and transforming materials from what was once called the waste stream. Recommunity was formed to make a real, positive impact within communities everywhere; creating jobs, wealth and environmental leadership.