Recycling has been a way of life for Ryan Ellis.

Growing up his grandfather was a dentist in Cape Cod and would still pick up cans alongside the road and wherever else he found them.

“He was a Depression baby. In World War II they had scrap drives,” Ellis, who now lives in Coram, explained during an interview recently.

The tradition of recycling was handed down through the generations of the Ellis family as they traveled across the country.

Ellis grew up in several states in the East but went to college at the University of Montana. He got a degree in carpentry but skipped graduation ceremonies to take a job with the railroad in Alaska, where he worked summers as a tour guide and brake man and eventually, conductor.

In Alaska, he continued to collect and sell scrap metal to supplement his income. Still, he was often in Montana as the Alaska work was only during the summer months. He met his wife, Megan, at the Stonefly Lounge in Coram. She grew up in Kalispell.

They’ve been married for 11 years. The couple started out with a small cabin near the railroad tracks in Coram. They would work summers in Alaska and spend winters in Montana. The cabin was primitive to say the least. They got their water from the Berne Park Spring in those early days.

But they saved up some money, bought some more land adjacent to what they had just before the pandemic real estate boom hit, and Ellis went into the recycling business full time. (He also cuts lawns in the summer and plows snow in the winter.)

His friend, Bob Love, refers to him as the Fred Sanford of the Canyon. Sanford, for those old enough to remember the TV show or have seen it on reruns, was a crotchety owner of a junkyard on the TV show “Sanford and Son.”

Ellis is far from crotchety, however. He’s about the nicest guy anyone would ever want to meet.

Ellis is also the man behind the big trailers full of aluminum cans at the Columbia Falls Community Market and near Park Provisions in Coram, right along U.S. 2 as well as fishing access sites at Teakettle and Lake Five, in cooperation with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

The trailers not only encourage recycling, but a portion of the proceeds go toward local causes: The Gateway to Glacier Trails group, which is building and maintaining trails from Columbia Falls to West Glacier, and the Flathead River Alliance, which does a host of good work keeping people safe and the area rivers clean.

Each nonprofit gets 25% of the proceeds and the other 50% to Ellis for upkeep of the trailers and to haul the cans to Pacific Steel and Recycling.

The market for scrap aluminum is good right now, as the Trump administration has placed steep tariffs on the imported metal.

Ellis has also been working with Pursuit, which employs Megan, on its recycling in and around Glacier National Park. He said the idea of recycling the cans came about when Community Market Director Melissa Ellis (no relation) approached Pursuit about sponsoring recycling at the market on Thursday nights.

The company bought in, recycling bins were brought in and the program blossomed.

“I try to make recycling easy,” he said.

Ellis hopes to expand recycling program in other communities.

“I’d like to find a Whitefish location,” he said.

The trailers, unlike other municipal receptacles, make it easy to dump cans. Ellis sorts out the occasional plastic bottle that gets thrown in and Pacific likes him because he delivers a clean product, he said.

Jerry Sandven of Country Muffler in rural Columbia Falls helped him build the trailers.

Ellis said the idea of the trailers isn’t really new. When he was attending elementary school in South Carolina there was a trailer at the school as a fundraiser. He said he went back not too long ago and it was still there, 29 years later.