In October, the Rotary Club of Austin-Southwest celebrated its two-year anniversary hosting a booth to collect un-recyclable Styrofoam from the community and taking it to the City of Austin Recycle/Reuse Center. To achieve one of the objectives of Rotary International (to protect the environment), our Club saw a need to assist Austin citizens in transporting Styrofoam to the Recycle/Reuse Center.
Too much of this nonrecyclable product is going into the landfill. It takes five hundred years for Styrofoam to break down and when it does, it does so into dangerous chemical components.
The Club started a pilot project on the first Saturday of each month at the SFC Farmer’s Market-Sunset Valley location, reaching out to the community through social media, Next Door pages, our website, and press releases. The Austin American Statesman newspaper featured our project with photos about a year after we sent out the press releases. We were invited to present our project at the annual Earth-X conference in Dallas in April 2024. The word has spread.
The Club has experienced membership growth since this project began as well as obtaining community volunteers at the booth. We have even had a few grateful Styrofoam donors contribute financially to this project.
In October 2025, exactly two years after we began our initial pilot project, we hit the 2000-pound landmark. That is a TON!! One of our members calculated if all the Styrofoam filled contractor bags and ice chests we have collected were stacked end on end, the stack would be taller than the tallest building in the Austin skyline.
The Recycle/Reuse Center has equipment to cut up the clean Styrofoam, heat it into a molten form which is then extruded into large blocks. These large blocks cooled and sold for use as insulation, park benches, picture frames, and other useful objects. It is not recycled, but re-purposed.
We will continue this project every first Saturday of each month, from 9am-1pm. Come see us! If we can help you set up a similar project, please contact us through our website and we can share our model. When you get your Club and your project out into the public, good things can happen!