Boulder County Recycling Center

Opened in 2001, Boulder County Colorado’s recycling facility serves as the centerpiece of the community’s effort to divert waste from landfills. Its education center hosts thousands of visitors each year and provides guided and self-guided tours to the public, groups, and officials. Due to changing recycling technology and demands, a need arose to develop new messages to communicate the facility’s story.

A complete retrofit, the replacement exhibit’s design included adaptive reuse of many exhibit systems as well as fully developed new visitor engagement approaches. The Studio worked closely with the recycling center’s experts to create powerful messages that take complex systems and make them accessible and interesting to a broad public. Interactives express the dos and don’ts of Recycling 101 for the public. They also unpack deeply systemic messages about linear and circular economies and the relationship between user, manufacturer, and governmental entities in easy-to-digest graphics.

Interactive media provides an entertaining glimpse into how materials are sorted. A large landfill immersive exhibit invites the visitor to explore the risks and responsibilities we all share to keep nasty things out of the ground.