Recycling Entrepreneur’s Can-do Attitude Brings Aluminum Collection to the Canyon
Ryan Ellis was perplexed that businesses and residents of Bad Rock Canyon didn’t have any aluminum recycling options. So, he started his own.
By Zoë Buhrmaster
Ryan Ellis will tell you that it wasn’t his first choice to start a recycling program.
“I was kind of hoping somebody else would do it, to be honest,” Ellis said.
In Coram, where Ellis lives, the Flathead County container site does not accept recycling, with the nearest green box location that accepts recycling in Columbia Falls. Only households are allowed to use the drop-off sites and the county landfill in Kalispell accepts recycling for larger household items. Even then, Ellis described going to the landfill and watching with heartbreak as some blue bins pulled up and dumped everything into the landfill trash because of non-recyclable material that’s been mixed in, contaminating the load.
Ellis tried rallying local high school welding programs, football teams, and other groups in the valley around the idea of launching a program. All had their hands full, politely declining.
“I was like, ‘all right, fine, I’ll do it myself,’” Ellis said. “If no one is carrying the torch, someone’s got to.”
It started as simply asking customers of his lawncare company, Ellis Maintenance Services, for cans. Then, three years ago, Ellis walked into the Stonefly Lounge in Coram. He offered to pick up the bar’s aluminum at no charge, if bartenders took the time to collect cans in a separate bin. Around the same time, he started putting out bins to recycle cans at Cabin Fever Days, the annual midwinter festival that raises funds for the first responders of Bad Rock Canyon, featuring the famed barstool races on Martin City’s Sugar Hill.
“I was like, ‘can I just put out my own bins,’ and the organizers were like, ‘yeah sure, knock yourself out,’” Ellis said. “Surprisingly, a lot of people are really good about separating their stuff. I think there’s a fair number of people that actually do care.”
About a year and a half ago, his wife, Megan, who works for Pursuit as a retail operations manager in West Glacier, clued him in to conversations the company was having about recycling best practices. Ellis showed up on Pursuit’s doorstep as well, extending the same offer he had to the Stonefly – find a container to separately collect aluminum, and he would collect them at no cost to the company. The company had been outsourcing their recycling for the past three and a half years, but Ellis’ suggestion gave the program the boost it needed, said Tim McCann, West Glacier Village general manager.
“It’s a pretty neat little situation we have,” McCann said. “All the businesses in West Glacier Village collect their aluminum and drop it off at the RV Park in West Glacier. There’s a big ol’ bear-proof bin that Ryan has the keys to, and when he’s done mowing lawns at the West Glacier golf course, he picks up the aluminum and shuttles them back to his house – his processing plant.”
After collecting the cans, Ellis sorts out contaminants and takes the aluminum to Pacific Steel in Kalispell, which offers to pay anyone who drops off scrap metal. There’s a hopper that sorts through, pulling the steel out with a magnet and checking for plastics or other contaminants before weighing and bailing it into condensed cubes that weigh around 900 pounds each, sending the cubes to different mills around the country to be reused.
“Selfishly for me, there’s a monetary aspect, but then there’s the environmental aspect,” Ellis said. “If I can do this more efficiently, then a company from town can do it, and then I assure that it actually gets recycled too. I’ve been to the landfill before, literally dumping my trash and you see one of those blue bins pull up right next to me and they dump everything in it because it’s contaminated.”
Though some green box sites offer recycling, not all do, and for many who live in Bad Rock Canyon and Coram, it’s inconvenient to make an extra trip to Kalispell to deposit cans at Pacific Steel.
“We’re trying to make it easy for people,” Ellis said. “And, you know, it’s also more efficient from an environmental standpoint.”
In June this year, Ellis bought two trailers off Facebook and, with the help of friends Jerry Sandven, at Country Muffler, and Doyle Foley, he repurposed the materials, welding the trailers into two safe recycling deposit trailers that now sit at Park Provisions and the Columbia Falls Farmers Market.
As a longtime volunteer at Gateway to Glacier, Ellis partnered with the volunteer trails organization, promising to donate half of all proceeds to the company and designing signs for the trailers that honored the partnership.
“We’re incredibly grateful to Ryan for taking the initiative to implement this recycling program and allocate part of the process to our Cedar Flats and Bad Rock Canyon Wildlife Management Area trails, as well as the Gateway to Glacier Trail,” Amanda Minatra, program coordinator for the nonprofit, said.
When Ellis approached Stacey Schnebel, co-owner of Park Provisions and the neighboring Stonefly, about placing one of the trailers in the parking lot at Park Provisions, Schnebel agreed. Only after the fact did she find out about Ellis’ partnership with the nonprofit, which she said felt serendipitous due to her and her husband’s own concerted efforts to bring awareness to Gateway to Glacier trails, with one that runs right next to the two businesses.
Ellis parked the trailer outside the grab-and-go eats and lunch spot along U.S. Highway 2 and immediately attracted locals who live in Coram year-round. Within two weeks, it was full – just under 1,000 pounds of aluminum, amounting to the $600 that Ellis split between Gateway to Glacier and operating costs.
“It’s doesn’t look like a pile of trash,” Schnebel said. “The aluminum glitters and sparkles in the sun and that catches people’s eyes as they drive by, whether they live here or are commuting to work, and it serves as a reminder like, ‘hey, I should drop off my recycling.’ It’s kind of beautiful in that way.”
The other trailer went to the Columbia Falls Farmers Market, where the crew had attempted recycling programs in the past, but had never worked out, Executive Director Melissa Ellis (no relation) said. People bring their bags and dump them throughout the week, or when they visit the market on Thursdays. It was about a month and a half before it was filled.
“Anybody – individuals or commercial – can stop by and recycle foil, trays, aluminum cans at the trailer to help Gateway to Glacier,” Melissa Ellis said. “He leaves it there at the entrance of the market venue seven days a week … Ryan is just a really, really good person and makes you want to be a better person when you’re around him.”
Ryan Ellis traces his passion for recycling to back when he was a kid growing up in South Carolina, where a recycling bin, not unlike the two trailers he has now, sat outside his elementary school. To him, it’s about bringing people together just as much as it is the recycling.
“It’s something I’ve been passionate about for a long time,” Ellis said. “How can you do something that’s nonpartisan that brings people from different ends of the spectrum together to do something positive?… I was finally like, well, instead of just being frustrated about things you can’t control, you know, focus on something you can control. And do something that helps out the community.”
When his niece and nephew, Lily and JT Ellis, came into town recently to visit, he took them along on the “maiden voyage of the mothership trailer to Pacific Steel.”
Ryan Ellis has researched recycling glass, but the nearest glass processing facility is in Missoula, raising concerns about the additional carbon footprint from the drive. Instead, Ellis has leaned toward supporting methods that limit purchasing glass and plastics, and encourage purchasing aluminum products, something that Pursuit has since largely switched over to.
“I used to be someone that would wish-cycle,” said Ellis, referring to going through the motions of recycling without knowing for certain whether the material would be reused.
In its whole, the program was more hours and work than he thought it would be. However, for Ellis, “it’s definitely worth it.”
“Now, seeing how quick they’re filling up and seeing people from across the spectrum politically, or whatever, people are dropping cans off, which is pretty cool,” he said.
