Ciji Mitrisin never wanted to own a business, but she has always wanted to make a difference and was sick of waiting for someone else to do it.

A self-described “eco-nut,” Mitrisin has turned her passion for the environment into a small business.

After realizing there was a need for more recycling options for people living in Des Moines apartments, Mitrisin created Recycle Me Iowa, aimed at getting more apartment dwellers to recycle and educating people about recycling.

Recycle Me Iowa’s business model is relatively simple. Mitrisin said she drops off two bags – one for glass, and one for everything else – at the apartments, and on a designated day the tenants put the full bags in front of their door and Mitrisin takes them to a redemption center.

“Basically it’s just like a Curb It, but instead of a curb you have a hallway or a doorstep,” she said.

Right now, Recycle Me Iowa is just doing a small pilot program in the Ingersoll Avenue and Sherman Hill areas with about 15 to 20 customers. In the future, Mitrisin would like to expand the service to all of Greater Des Moines.

She said she is in talks with the owners of four apartment buildings on starting pilot programs and a materials recovery facility about using its site as a place to take what Recycle Me Iowa collects.

“I was completely surprised by how many people wanted to be on board,” she said. “This has been a struggle for people living in apartments.”

One of Mitrisin’s goals is to eventually expand into the Downtown area, specifically the East Viallge. She said a lot of new lofts are going up in the area and she wants to make sure developers consider recycling options from the start of the project.

Mitrisin said her main goal is to educate people and make a difference, so she hopes to develop a business model that people in other cities could use. She said she has found that many cities don’t have apartment recycling programs.

“It shouldn’t matter where you are located; you should be able to have recycling as a convenient option,” she said.

Although her business is just getting off the ground, Mitrisin got into the green movement in college.

While studying communications at the University of Northern Iowa, she gave a speech on why Cedar Falls needed to start a curbside program, instead of just having a drop-off site.

“I didn’t know anything about recycling until I learned about it, and once I learned about it, I had to make a choice,” Mitrisin said.

After college, Mitrisin wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her degree and because she’s never been “a cubicle type of girl,” she traveled to New Zealand for six months.

“I went over there, lived out of a van, lived very simple and had one of the most amazing experiences,” she said.

When she returned to the United States, Mitrisin ended up in Des Moines and she said she continued to live simply by shopping at farmers markets and secondhand stores.

The idea for Recycle Me Iowa came shortly after she explored a move to Omaha.

Mitrisin said she would ask what recycling options landlords offered during her apartment search and eventually discovered a similar program to Recycle Me Iowa based in Omaha.

“When I decided not to move, I thought: Des Moines needs this program,” she said. “I live in an apartment, and there’s hardly any drop-off sites anywhere, and they are very hard to contact to find where they are.”

At first, she tried to do a free program where she coupled people living in apartments with people who had curbside pickup in homes nearby. Mitrisin said she found that people wanted a service to take care of it instead. From there, Recycle Me Iowa was born.

The enterprise was built from the ground up, and Mitrisin said she kept it simple with friends and family helping in various ways. For example, the bags she gives to customers are made of old plastic grocery bags her cousin fused together.

Growing the business in a grass-roots style keeps costs down.

“I would like to keep it as cheap as possible,” Mitrisin said. “I don’t want people to be shied away from paying for recycling, which is why we are focusing so much on how great the service is, because what you are paying for is the valet service.”

In the end, the real goal of Recycle Me Iowa is to educate people, not only about recycling, but also about green living in general, Mitrisin said.

“The only reason why people don’t recycle is because they are misinformed, or they are informed and they choose to do nothing,” she said.

The best way to get involved, she said, is for people to start by reducing consumption, choosing food grown locally and educating themselves about what can and can’t be recycled.

“I don’t think people realize how powerful they are as a consumer,” she said, adding that if people start to purchase better items, corporations will notice and follow the market.

The green movement, she said, also doesn’t have to be just a West Coast trend; she thinks it can catch on in Iowa, and that Des Moines may be the place to start it in the Midwest.

Mitrisin said she used to want to move to California or Colorado, but said whenever she visited those places, she would meet people originally from Iowa.

Meeting those people made her ask, why would people move to start something when a movement could begin here?