Tag: Recycling

State Program Pays You $150 When You Replace a Gas-Powered Lawn Mower With an Electric One

Last week I promoted the idea of replacing your gas-powered lawn mower, trimmer and other garden tools with electric ones. A reader alerted me to a Colorado program that provides financial incentives for doing just that.

The program, which is detailed at www.MowDownPollution.org, provides for the following: a $75 voucher for any handheld electric yard tool when a gas version of that tool is recycled: a $75 voucher for an electric lawn mower without the requirement that a gas mower be recycled; and a $150 voucher for an electric lawn mower when you recycle a gas mower.

First you sign up for the program, and get a confirmation email. Then you have 21 days to recycle your lawn mower (for which they provide a list of local recyclers), then you get a voucher which you can redeem at selected Ace Hardware and Home Depot stores, also listed on that website. Only one voucher per household is allowed per year.

Before you can recycle a gas-powered tool, you must drain both the gas and oil.  Denver residents can call the At Your Door Special Collection curbside pickup service at 800-449-7587 for an appointment to recycle that gas and oil. Jeffco residents need to take their gas and oil to the Rooney Road Recycling Center. Get a drop-off reservation by calling 303-316-6262. Adams County residents can go to Veolia Colorado Household Hazardous Waste Recycling Center, 9131 E. 96th Avenue in Henderson. Call 303-526-8155 for appointment. And both Douglas and Arapahoe County residents can call (720) 200-1592 to request a curbside pickup.

Canadian Company Develops Recycled Rubber Roofing

The picture above is of Euroshield® roofing made from recycled tires. It is manufactured by G.E.M., a company in Calgary, Alberta. Henry Kamphuis founded the company in 1999 to solve the problem of old tires clogging up landfills and dumpsites. Several years later, after much research and trial-and-error, he came up with a green roofing system that is 95% made from the rubber in old tires. It takes over 400 such tires to provide the rubber for a typical roof.

The roofing tiles are connected by a tongue-and-groove design and can be made to look like slate tiles, shown above, or wood shakes.

The roofing is sold and installed in the Denver metro area by Johnson Construction Company LLC, which you can reach at 303-719-7663, or via their website, www.RoofsByJohnson.com. The cost of a Euroshield roof is more than twice that of a conventional composition shingle roof, but it comes with a 50-year warranty against damage from up to 2” hail with no pro-rating and no deductible. The company installed a Euroshield roof in Golden’s Amberwick subdivision after a 2017 hail storm. Those roofs survived two subsequent hail storms without any visible damage.

Our Commitment: Keeping Styrofoam Out of Landfills

One element of Golden Real Estate’s commitment to sustainability is our acceptance of polystyrene in the Styrofoam Corral behind our office on South Golden Road. Perhaps you have wondered what we do with all that Styrofoam.

At least twice every month we fill our truck with what everyone (including us) calls Styrofoam, but that’s a brand name. The generic term is expanded polystyrene foam, or EPS. We take each truckload to Centennial Containers southeast of Peoria Street and I-70. There the material, which is 95% air, is “densified,” compressed into those foot-square bars shown at right, which are then stacked on pallets each weighing over 1,000 pounds. One of our truck loads might make just one of those bars of compressed material! Eventually a semi trailer filled with those pallets is taken to an American company which recycles those bars into new polystyrene or other plastic-based products.

We used to take our loads to Alpine Waste’s recycling facility located northwest of the I-70/I-25 interchange, but they ship their densified polystyrene to China. When China cut down on accepting plastic waste from the United States, we switched to Centennial Containers and have found them easier to work with, too.

Our polystyrene recycling is only one part of Golden Real Estate’s commitment to sustainability which won us our second Sustainability Award from the City of Golden in 2020. Since receiving our first award in 2010, we transitioned our building to Net Zero Energy in 2017 by removing our natural gas meter and installing a heat pump mini-split system to heat and cool our office electrically. Our 20-kW solar photovoltaic system provides all the electricity for powering our office as well as charging our five Tesla vehicles and providing free EV charging to the general public in our parking lot.