‘Badass everything’: Green Girl Recycling’s growth came with take-charge attitude

“If you wanna make something work, you gotta think outside the box,” said Bridget Johnson as she bustles around the Longmont warehouse of Green Girl Recycling, the company she started and owns.

There are boxes on boxes of electronics that need to be safely disposed of, her phone is ringing, and two 18-wheelers have pulled up to haul away bales of shredded paper. Those are the most pressing concern. Julian, one of her employees, is loading the trucks with a forklift, driving it up a narrow ramp three 1,200-pound bales at a time.

That this is Green Girl now shows how far it’s come since 1998, when it was one trailer hitched to a Jeep on Sugarloaf Mountain. Now it handles residential, commercial and civic recycling in Boulder, Larimer and Weld counties. It has contracts ranging from Larimer County to Crocs to Aims Community College, and it was a Mercury 100 fastest-growing private company in 2010, 2011 and 2012.

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“I always knew that I’d own my own business,” Johnson said. “I just didn’t know what. So that was hard to figure out — the what.”

The what came in the lack of recycling infrastructure on Sugarloaf Mountain, where Johnson lived after business school at the University of Northern Colorado and some time on ski patrol. Wind, snow and steep roads kept trucks from making it up there much, and Johnson and her friends had a lot of beer bottles they needed to recycle.

“I saw that need,” she said. “You know, the recycling need, and the chips kinda fell into place. It should be so easy that it’s ridiculous. It’s probably slapping you in the face.”

So it was. Her then-boyfriend, now-husband Matt Johnson, sold his truck to pay for that first $3,500 trailer. She promised him she’d replace it. The Jeep could go where trash trucks couldn’t, and Johnson started making trips up and down the mountain.

She went door-to-door on Sugarloaf for more than 100 consecutive days to enlist customers. Johnson used to sell books the same way (“the crappiest job I’ve ever had in my whole life”), so she knew how to do it — never, ever face the door when you knock on it. She stood a few steps back, turned sideways and pretended to be busy. Let people size her up before they opened their doors. She carried a map, on which she wrote every detail she could about each house — how many kids they had, their kids’ names, their dog’s name.

Sometimes, they invited her to dinner, and she said “yes,” whether they signed up or not. Sometimes they pointed guns at her. Most of those places had “No Trespassing” signs, but she knocked on their doors anyway because, well, they could’ve been customers. But she signed up Green Girl’s first customers — first house on the left coming up Sugarloaf, with the steep driveway — that way, and they’re still with the company today.

One customer became 30 became 100 — Johnson threw a huge party for that one — and, in 2004, Green Girl received a grant from Boulder County to buy a hydraulic-lift bed for the back of a four-by-four truck, which could get anywhere in the mountains, even better than the Jeep, and carry a lot more recycling. Johnson names all of her trucks after loved ones; this one is “Betsy,” after a cousin in Arizona.

“Back then, I had no money. This was such a big deal,” Johnson said. “That’s when, literally, life became easy. Because we could do pickups so much faster, we could fit so many more houses on here. We tripled our route ability in a day.”

That same year, Green Girl bought Green Mountain Recycling and absorbed commercial contracts throughout Boulder County. It took Johnson a year to sort out Green Mountain’s messy books, but the company kept growing, and it received another grant in 2006.

In 2008, at the beginning of the recession, Green Girl bought equipment and rights to about 400 customers from Waste Not Recycling. The recycling market tanked that year — well, every market tanked — because recycling was one of the first things to go when floundering cities and businesses needed to cut costs. 

There may not have been a worse time to make such an acquisition. But Johnson thought outside the box. She saw how much more efficiently Green Girl’s recycling systems were than Waste Not’s. Green Girl did that route five times more quickly.

“There was two months where I would go to bed at night thinking it was the worst decision ever, taking on all of this,” Johnson said. “I just had such a sense of responsibility at that point. I’ve got all these employees, and I’ve got a baby, and maybe this wasn’t the smartest thing to do. And it wound up being one of the best things I’ve ever done.”

Green Girl has become an anomaly — a small-business recycling service that thrived despite the recession. It’s grown every year, and last year was its most profitable ever.

“When the markets come back, everyone will want to get into recycling again,” Johnson said. “It’ll be sexy. When I got into it, it wasn’t sexy, then it became really cool for a while, and now it’s totally not cool anymore because it’s really hard to make money.”

It helps that Green Girl is in Boulder County, which creates a recycling market for itself. The city of Boulder recently announced that it’s going zero-waste this year, which means that businesses will have to recycle and compost. Everyone in Boulder who recycles with Green Girl will be composting with them, too.

As Johnson talks about this, she shows off a promise fulfilled — Matt’s replacement truck, a hulking full-size model — painted, of course, deep green. She’s going to replace the generic Toyota grill with an all-black rendition of Green Girl’s logo, to give it “badass everything.”

Then Johnson dashes back to work to make sure that the right bales of shredded paper are being loaded into the semis. She studies closely as the forklift inches precariously up the ramp, bales barely squeezing in through the doors of the semi. That might be the closest she comes to thinking inside the box all day.

Correction: The original version of this story stated that Green Girl Recycling bought Waste-not recycling. Green Girl acquired only customers and equipment from Waste Not. We regret the error.