Where e-waste becomes opportunity.
Green Vision Inc. is a Northern New Jersey nonprofit that uses hands-on electronics recycling to help adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities build skills, confidence, routine, and greater independence.
Founded in Randolph in 2010, our model brings responsible recycling and human development together in one integrated operation. We’re not just recycling electronics. We’re creating a structured place where people are known, supported, and proud of what they contribute.
How It Started
Green Vision was founded by Tim Butler, a special education teacher who spent years watching his students graduate with nowhere to go. The world after graduation didn’t have much built around them – few options for skill building, structured tasks, real friendships, or daily life worth investing in.
Tim’s idea was simple: build that place. Create a day that felt real: hands-on enough to matter, structured enough to keep people growing, and steady enough to come back to every day. Electronics recycling fit. But the recycling was always the means. The point was the day itself — somewhere to be, something to do, and people who'd notice if you weren't there.
What began in a single workshop in Randolph has grown into a two-campus operation with over 30 participants daily, more than 400 individuals served over 16 years, and a recycling model certified to the highest standards in the industry.
But the numbers don’t tell the full story. What makes Green Vision different is what happens day to day. People walk through our doors and find a place where they get to be themselves. An ISP describes a person on paper. We get to know who they actually are. The traits that some programs treat as obstacles — quirks, communication styles, ways of moving through the world — are welcomed here. People grow into themselves, not into someone else’s expectation of them.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
Adults with disabilities deserve more than programs that fill daytime hours.
They deserve more than a place to go during the day. They deserve structure that builds skills, routines, confidence, and greater independence. And they deserve to see that their time, effort, and participation are connected to something meaningful.
At Green Vision, every task is part of a larger purpose. The electronics participants help dismantle are kept out of landfills. The skills they build are not theoretical. They show up in the everyday — in steady hands, completed steps, growing confidence, stronger routines, and friendships that carry beyond the recycling floor. The progress participants make is noticed, supported, documented, and celebrated.
Our Model
At first glance, Green Vision looks like an electronics recycling operation. Look closer and the recycling is the vehicle for something else: a hands-on environment where adults with developmental disabilities build skills they carry into every part of life.
The hands-on environment does the teaching. Inventory, sorting, and dismantling build focus. Pulling apart a printer means pulling apart a problem — step by step, piece by piece, with a clear beginning and end. Participating alongside the same familiar team each day builds communication, trust, and social confidence in a way that can’t be recreated in a circle of chairs. None of it feels abstract. It happens through real tasks, real routines, and a daily rhythm that gives each person room to grow.
Businesses and institutions send us their end-of-life electronics. Funding through New Jersey’s Division of Developmental Disabilities helps sustain our programs. Together, those pieces create a model where the daily routine has a clear purpose — and the growth happening within that routine is the real heart of Green Vision.
WHERE WE'RE HEADED
More people served. More skills built. More lives changed.
Our second campus in Lafayette, New Jersey is now open and enrolling, expanding capacity to serve more individuals across Sussex County and Northern New Jersey. Our model continues to be studied and replicated by organizations nationally.
The goal hasn’t changed: more people served, more skills built, more electronics diverted from landfills, and more pathways to meaningful, independent lives.