Options use the catalog’s listed facts and planning estimates for cost, timing, effort, travel, and material outcome. Your preferences determine their order. Environmental indicators are qualitative comparisons, not measured carbon footprints.

Spending the least and making the most are different goals

They sit on the same dollar axis but optimize opposite things. Cheapest counts only money guaranteed to stay in your pocket, so an option that pays off just 40% of the time scores as zero there. Money-back mode uses planning estimates of possible net proceeds, with condition, demand, and timing still to confirm. One slider cannot express both.

Resale figures are estimates

Resale depends on condition, demand, timing, and provider terms. The pilot does not have observed sell-through probabilities; modeled figures are not promised proceeds.

Nine preferences, because people want different things

Money is only two of them, and they pull opposite ways. Beyond that: least effort, speed, and material outcome. Then four that most tools ignore entirely. Whether it reaches a person who needs it rather than a shredder. Whether the value stays in Boulder County. Whether you have to deal with a stranger at all, which matters more to more people than anyone building these tools admits. And whether you walk away with a deduction, where the organization can provide the relevant documentation.

Recycling is the fourth-best environmental answer

Most tools collapse the whole environmental question into one word. It is at least five separate questions, and they disagree with each other. Does the object survive intact, or does it get shredded into feedstock? How far does it travel and how much energy does the processing take? Can anyone actually tell you where it ends up, or does the trail stop at a private buyer? Does any of it get buried? The material-outcome model generally prioritizes extending use, then reuse, then recycling; actual environmental outcomes depend on the item and process. There is a separate ranking here for each of those, plus one combined measure.

All of Boulder County, not just the city

Longmont, Lafayette, Louisville, Superior, Erie, Lyons, Nederland, Niwot and Gunbarrel each run their own collection and their own drop-offs, and the mountain communities are an hour from Recycle Row. Every item carries an option pointing you at your own municipality first, because for a lot of residents that is a shorter drive and a lower fee than anything in Boulder.

Safety rules run before ranking

Hazardous materials are filtered out of landfill routes before any scoring happens, so no preference weight can outvote them. Open "what we ruled out" under any hazardous item to see what was removed and why.

Where the data comes from

Five layers, not one. Addresses, hours and fees come from each organization's own published information and are kept current against a places directory. Material-to-facility mapping comes from national recycling directories for anything the county has not catalogd. Resale figures are planning estimates and require current sold-price research before a decision. The wanted board contains posts submitted to Revivo. Other neighborhood sites are linked, not imported. Pop-ups, church drives and one-person operations come from local search sweeps and from residents submitting them, because they exist in no database anywhere.

The compost rules changed, and most guides have not caught up

Since April 2023 the Front Range compost system takes two categories and nothing else: food scraps, and yard and plant trimmings. Paper towels, napkins, tissues, shredded paper, tea bags and coffee filters are all out. So is every compostable cup, plate, utensil and takeout container, even certified ones, because A1 Organics found that inspectors cannot tell the genuine from the lookalikes once a load arrives. No bags at all, with one exception for a three-gallon certified countertop liner. Put anything else in the cart and your hauler may simply not collect it.

Where your glass actually goes

Boulder County's glass is trucked to Momentum Recycling in Broomfield, Colorado's first bottle-to-bottle plant. It is washed, sorted into green, brown and clear, and sent to O-I Glass, which supplies bottles to Molson Coors, Anheuser-Busch and New Belgium. A bottle can be back on a shelf in about thirty days. Colorado still only recycles somewhere between a quarter and a third of its glass, which is why the jar you keep and reuse counts for more than the jar you put in the bin.

Why reuse beats recycling, in numbers

Resource Central alone has diverted more than 74 million pounds of building materials from landfill, and in 2025 moved over five million pounds while saving local residents around three million dollars. Their reclaimed stock sells for 50 to 75% below retail. That is what the "keep it whole and in use" ranking is pointing at: the same door, still a door, in somebody else's house, instead of being ground into feedstock.

Every card says whether it was checked

Three tiers, and they add up to one hundred. percent of the options carry a link to the organization's own published page, and the address, the hours, the fee and what they take at the gate were read off it. Those say so on the card. percent need no source at all, because "keep it and use it yourself" or "post it to your neighbors" is not a claim about a business. The last percent are real places with no public page that supports the specific claim on the card: a church drive, a lending shelf, a one-person operation. They say exactly that, rather than borrowing the credibility of a citation they do not have, which is what a link to a loosely related page amounts to. A tool that quietly presents a guess as a fact is worse than one that admits the gap.

The board is a route, so it is ranked like one

"Post it on the board" sits in the ranked list against every facility, because for a lot of things it genuinely is the best answer: it costs nothing, nothing gets shredded, the object stays whole and in use, and the value stays in the county. It is scored on the same axes as everything else and it wins or loses on them. What it cannot promise is certainty, so it carries a real acceptance rate rather than a guarantee, and each card tells you how many people are asking for that exact thing right now. Zero is a legitimate answer and the card says zero.

A Saturday is not one object

Every card until now answered one question about one thing. But a garage clear-out is six things, and the tool was sending you on six trips to a car park you were already standing in. districts group the places close enough that one stop covers all of them; alone takes different things in the same area. Put your list in and the run planner counts coverage per district, counts the drive once, adds up the fees against anything you get back, and checks whether the doors are open. It ranks by whatever you say matters: the most cleared in one stop, the shortest drive, or the cheapest overall. Anything no district takes is listed as not taken, because a plan that quietly drops two of your six is worse than no plan, and a route that says your town "may" take something is shown as a call to make rather than counted as coverage.

Distance is computed from your town, not guessed

Effort and carbon used to be numbers set by hand, describing a trip in the abstract. A facility on 63rd Street scored the same for someone in Boulder as for someone in Nederland, when for one it is ten minutes and for the other an hour down a canyon. places now carry coordinates, all towns carry a center point, and the distance between them is folded into the effort and carbon scores before anything is ranked. So a Nederland resident asking for the least effort now sees the Nederland transfer station, not a drive to Boulder. The figures are honest about their resolution: straight line multiplied by 1.32 for road detour, coordinates good to about a quarter mile, and the word "about" on every one. It tells you which is nearer. It is not a route planner.

Opening hours to the minute

facilities carry a real weekly schedule rather than a sentence. The card says "open now until 5pm", "open now, closes in 40 minutes", or "closed, opens Thursday at 8am", worked out from the clock on your own device. Saturday is where this earns its place: Western Disposal shuts at two, Atlas closes its gates forty minutes before the office, and the Nederland station is shut on Wednesdays. Those are the trips that get wasted.

What gets you turned away at the door

conditions were sitting in the middle of paragraphs: bring a utility bill, residents only, book a slot, a fee on arrival, someone inspects the item, one box per household. They are chips on the card now, so the thing most likely to end the trip is visible before you make it. of them were the opposite of what the prose scan first suggested, because the sentence said "no appointment needed"; those read "walk in".

Things that happen and then stop happening

A repair clinic in five days is more use than a facility open all year, and a collection Saturday that has passed is worse than useless. recurring events carry their own dates: the ones with a published date count down to it, and the ones that recur but have not been scheduled say so instead of guessing. They appear on the home screen in date order, and on any item they take, when they are close enough to be worth waiting for.

How it stays current

Every option that links out to an organization was checked against that organization's own page by hand, and the link sits on the card so you can check it yourself. Nothing here claims to re-verify itself overnight: a static page cannot, and saying otherwise would be the same kind of quiet overstatement this tool exists to avoid. Options with no link are local knowledge, submitted by residents or gathered from pop-ups and drives that have no website at all. Those are the ones nothing else has, and they are also the ones most likely to change, so they are marked differently on purpose.

What none of it covers

No national directory knows that CHaRM charges three dollars per vehicle and waives it if you arrive by bike, or that the county hazardous facility is free but wants proof of address. Those local specifics are maintained by hand, and they are the reason this is more useful than a search box.