Cleanup Cup GGR Warehouse Tour

Today we had the pleasure of welcoming the Cleanup Cup crew to Green Girl Recycling for a big behind-the-scenes tour of our warehouse and all the different recycling services we provide.

The Cleanup Cup is a community game designed to clean up our cities, improve everyday habits, and bring people together around sustainability.

Each week, the program highlights a different sustainability goal with educational challenges you can bring into your own home. There are also weekly Cleanup Crew trash walks, plus tours, celebrations, challenges, and hands-on opportunities to get involved.

There really is an entry point for everyone.

You can sign up anytime during the program at cleanupcup.org and see the collective impact people are making together.

Photo caption:The Cleanup Cup crew getting up close and personal with recycling inside one of Green Girl Recycling’s trailers full of shredded office paper bales. Field trip level: expert. 😄

We LOVE when groups come ready with great questions, and today’s favorite was:

“What happens to the mattresses you recycle?”

Great question!

We take the mattresses we collect to our recycling partner, Spring Back Colorado in Commerce City, where they are taken apart piece by piece.

The foam is removed and baled, then sent to a processor where 100% of that foam is ground, washed, and repurposed into material for new mattresses. The metal frames are baled and sent to a Colorado scrap metal recycler, while the wood and fabric components are processed for uses such as pulp and insulation.

That is one of the things we love most about tours like this. People get to see that recycling is much more than tossing something into a bin. There is an entire chain of sorting, processing, transportation, and creative reuse happening behind the scenes.

And of course, we had to have some fun while everyone was here! The group climbed into one of our 18-wheel trailers where we store giant bales of SOP, shredded office paper, before that material heads off to be recycled. The photo pretty much captures the spirit of the day.