Last May, Connie Grenz set out to recycle plastic bags. Soon, she’ll have bench to show for it.
Grenz, a persistent volunteer who also runs Boulder’s weekly Farmer’s Market, already had led the community’s drive to collect and recycle #1 and #2 plastic containers. Her new effort, under the aegis of the Boulder Area Chamber of Commerce, was aimed at stretchable plastic bags – like those from grocery and department stores.
Trex Company, which makes composite decking, outdoor furniture and other products from recycled plastics, offered community entrepreneurs like Grenz a challenge: Collect 1000 pounds of recyclable bags within a year, and win a 48” outdoor bench.
Grenz set up collection points at the L&P Grocery, Family Tree Dollar, and other stores and schools. “People have been good,” she said. “We’ve filled a box at the L&P pretty much every week.”
But the big boon came from the L&P itself, which harvests 20 to 30 pounds a week of plastic wrap from pallets of food and other products delivered to the store. “Without that,” Grenz said, “we never would have made it.”
Grenz says she plans to order the bench in forest green, and to rest on it as she tends to this year’s farmers’ markets at Veterans Park.
And now, she’s looking for other community groups in Boulder to move the effort forward, tending to the collection boxes and bringing the bags every so often to Albertson’s in Helena. She said she has talked to the Boulder Cemetery Committee, the Music and Arts Council and the Outlaws 4-H club, among others, about partnering on the program.
“If we could get a bench every year,” she said, “that would be really good.”
