If you have spent any time around Chicago’s construction and demolition recycling community, you have probably heard the Tazelaar name. Taz Recycling is a family-owned company in the truest sense, and the story behind it is exactly the kind of story that makes our industry special. 

The Tazelaar family’s roots in Chicago-area waste and recycling go back to 1968, when Ron Tazelaar Sr. bought Tazelaar Disposal in Berwyn. Over the decades that followed, the family built and sold multiple hauling companies before launching Economy Disposal Service in 1998 with two roll-off trucks and a whole lot of hard work. In 2010, they opened their own Construction and Demolition Recycling Transfer Station in McCook, and Taz Recycling as we know it today was underway. Owners Ron Tazelaar and Dan Rudman have grown that single McCook facility into a network of four IEPA-permitted C&D recycling facilities across the Chicago metro area, including MBL Recycling in Palatine, the Aurora Recycling Center, and River’s Edge Recycling in Plainfield. 

What has made Taz stand out is a value that is easy to say and hard to live. They put it this way themselves: “We are big enough to handle any project, and small enough to know our customers by first name.” Their published mission talks about faith, family, and being good stewards of the environment, and if you know the Tazelaar’s, you know that is not marketing language. It is how they run the business. 

There is something else worth mentioning that shapes how Taz operates day to day. The Tazelaar’s are proudly Dutch, and as Ron has put it himself, Dutch culture is known for being hard-working, practical, and well-organized. You can feel that in the operation. Today, Taz is one of the few Dutch-owned businesses of its kind still going strong in Chicago, and that heritage of steady, disciplined work ethic shows up in everything from how the facilities are run to how customers are treated. 

You can see it most clearly in how they take care of their people. Ron and Dan hold regular safety meetings with their drivers and sorting line teams, and they have made a real investment in a safety culture that protects the men and women doing the hard work every day. That commitment to their employees carries through in the family’s involvement in the community, including their support of many ministries and nonprofits throughout Chicagoland.  

Thank you to Ron, Dan, and the entire Taz Recycling team for the work you continue to do in Chicago and for being such a strong part of the CDRA community.