City-Wide Single Hauler Trash/Recycle Program

Manitou Springs is the first community in southern Colorado to initiate a Single Hauler Residential Trash and Recycle Service. After a competitive bidding process, several community meetings, and some lively discussions at City Council, locally owned Bestway disposal was awarded the contract on May 9, 2010. As dictated by state law the contract is for single-family houses and multiple units of 7 or less. Bestway initiated this new service during mid-August, 2010 with the following encouraging results:

Bestway ran the trash and recycle numbers for comparison on September 20, 2010 – approximately one month after the residential Single Hauler Contract went into effect.

Participating households showed a 28% recycle volume as a part of the overall waste stream. In other words, we diverted 7.05 tons of trash that week to recycle. That equates to 30.5 tons per month or 366 tons of recycle annually!  Since Manitou Springs City Council did not require eligible households to recycle there are still about 200 “holdouts” that for various reasons opt not to recycle. Our Climate Protection Campaign is working to ‘get them on board”. Stay tuned for progress reports.