On July 22, 2021, Bridget Johnson, local business owner and founder of Green Girl Recycling will be receiving the Titan 100 award, which recognizes the top 100 CEOs and C-level executives in the Colorado Denver Metropolitan area who demonstrate exceptional leadership, vision, passion, and influence in their field.

“I feel so honored… it’s humbling to be around such greatness. There’s an application process, [and] there’s this board that reviews them all, and they put together the 100 Titans each year, so this year I’m being honored to be one of those Titans.”

Asked to explain what made her decide to start a recycling business, she talked about how the idea first formed.

“I started Green Girl in the mountains… when I lived on Sugarloaf back in 1998,” she said, “we had a huge party, I lived with four girls, and we were always partying. And I was the only one who was responsible enough to separate the recycling, put it in a special bin… and I wished there was… a service that would come get this in the mountains. I called Western one day and it was like eighty bucks, really pricey to have them come up and pick up this pile of recycling that I had collected. So… I wondered if someone would pay for a service, like fifteen or twenty bucks a month to have someone come get it.”

It was an idea that she decided had merit, and it was then she earned her nickname. “My friends were like, ‘You’re such a green girl.’” They encouraged her to test whether she could create a viable business. She made maps of neighborhoods and went door-to-door to gauge interest and decided for ten days to knock on doors to see how many people she could get to sign up.

“Ten days turned into over a hundred days, because I kept signing people up,” she said, “and I was like oh my gosh, this is a real business. I was finding one out of four houses saying yes back then so I just had to knock on a lot of doors.”

She remembers that Boulder was very conservative, and that people were hesitant to pay somebody to go into their garage. She said that people she initially contacted wouldn’t sign up until years later, and she needed customers in the first year. She is still happy to have them any time, of course, but she still remembers the struggle of the first years.

Johnson also had her parents to help find her direction. “My parents wanted me to teach. They were like, ‘man you’re so good with other people, explaining things, you should be a teacher,’ because then you’ll have things like retirement, a pension… my family’s from New York, and teaching is a really great profession,” she said, “and you always want your kids to be safe… but what they weren’t paying attention to was that my parents were entrepreneurs, they always had their own companies.”

Johnson doesn’t regret her decision and is able to look back and reflect on her journey.

“[It’s] life, right? You’re going to choose. Hopefully you find something that fills your soul up, versus something that just makes money,” she said, “and definitely, with Green Girl… a customer came in recently and said… ‘you have great energy, you must love what you do,’ and I said, ‘I love what I do.’ I wake up every morning and I’m still jazzed to get out of bed, I’m still excited about the next thing. The coolest thing about what I do is I meet new people all the time, I’m constantly helping people make greener choices, and I’m… always learning something new.”

Johnson stays conscious of her good fortune. “We weren’t thinking about return on investment in your time and your energy, and cost,” she said, “so… when you want to start a company, and you want to make a difference or you want to do something you’re passionate about, if it works, is it sustainable? Is it going to be working in the future? And then are you going to be making more money, or less money… I feel extremely blessed every day because not only did it work out, but now there’s this green movement, and there wasn’t when I started.”

She has no plans to slow down. In fact Green Girl has been growing since she began. “They expanded in 2004 purchasing Green Mountain Recycling and again in 2008 by acquiring Waste-Not recycling. Green Girl Recycling was first named to Mercury 100 Fastest Growing Companies in 2010 and has successfully been honored with this award in 2011, 2012, 2013 and again in 2015 -2018,” according to their website https://www.greengirlrecycling.com.

“I still love it. I don’t know too many people who have been in business for over twenty years that like what they do still,” she said, “a lot of them are still doing it because they don’t know what else to do.”

Green Girl recycling offers numerous services to Boulder, Larimer, and Weld counties. They offer commercial and residential recycling, electronics, and hard to recycle items as well as data destruction and cleanouts of storage units to include paper shredding.

They are located at 21 South Sunset Street, Longmont, Colorado, 80501. To find out more about Green Girl Recycling and its services go to https://www.greengirlrecycling.com.