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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 work, real friendships, or daily life worth investing in.
Tim's idea was simple: build that place. Find work that was hands-on enough to be real, progressive 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 work that builds skills, routines, and confidence. They deserve a pathway toward greater independence. And they deserve to see the impact of what they do.
At Green Vision, every participant’s work has real consequences. The electronics they dismantle don’t end up in a landfill. The skills they develop aren’t theoretical. They show up in the everyday — in steady hands, in finished tasks, in friendships that last beyond the workday, and in the quiet confidence of knowing your effort matters. The progress they make is tracked, supported, 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 work itself does the teaching. Inventory and dismantling build focus. Pulling apart a printer means pulling apart a problem — sequenced, finished, and on to the next one. Working alongside the same team every day builds social muscle that programs can’t manufacture in a circle of chairs. None of this gets framed as practice. It just happens, because the work is real.
Businesses and institutions send us their end-of-life electronics. State funding through the Division of Developmental Disabilities sustains our programs. The result is a model where the day’s work has obvious purpose — and the growth that happens behind that work is what we’re really after.
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.