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This story was corrected on June 12, 2008, from its print version.

BOULDER, Colo. — When Regina Bock was growing up in California, she hardly ever recycled. Her family had no recycling bins, and only collected newspapers during an occasional Scout troop fundraiser.

As an adult, Bock has become a champion of reducing, reusing and recycling in Boulder.

Just outside Bock’s front door, a stack of green plastic containers sits about 4 feet tall, brimming with glass bottles, aluminum cans and newspapers. Outside her back door sits a round black plastic container where her family dumps compostable materials, such as food scraps. It’s one of two in her backyard.

The Bocks have just one small trash can for garbage headed to the landfill.

Bock, a full-time mom, and her husband, Jim, have worked hard to create a lifestyle that comes as close to ‘‘zero waste” as most Americans can manage. Bock’s two children, Logan, 12, and Becky, 15, were raised differently than their mother, when it comes to reducing, reusing and recycling.

‘‘When I was a kid, trash was cheap ... but trash isn’t cheap anymore, and it’s going to get more expensive,” Bock said at her home Sunday night. ‘‘For long-term survival, communities are going to have to learn how to recycle.”

The City of Boulder and Boulder County have done a good job at learning how to recycle and teaching residents how to do the same in the last 30 years, the Bocks said.

Jim Bock was among the first wave of energetic volunteers three decades ago who helped start Eco-cycle in Boulder. He and his wife recalled the almost party-like atmosphere of the recycling movement in the 1970s and early 1980s, when dedicated volunteers hung up homemade signs in their grass-roots efforts to alert neighbors to monthly recycling pickups via buses.

Recycling has become much more mainstream since then, Regina said. ‘‘You don’t have to take [recycled materials] somewhere, and a lot more stuff can be recycled.”

When Regina Bock moved to Boulder 25 years ago, only a handful of people recycled, she said. Now, everyone in the city has a recycling container and Bock said most, if not all, of her neighbors use them.

Still, Bock acknowledged that reaching zero waste will be almost impossible in the United States. ‘‘We’re very careful, and we still have a fair amount of trash,” she said. ‘‘But they keep finding new ways to recycle more stuff. And it keeps getting easier.”

The city will make recycling even easier for its residents later this month when it rolls out single-stream recycling — one bin where all recycled materials are thrown together and collected.

Logan Bock, a rising eighth-grader at Casey Middle School in Boulder, said he thinks ease is the key to ensure more people recycle.

‘‘Some people just like the convenience of not having to think about where it goes. ‘This is plastic, so I have to do this, and this is metal, so I have to do that.’ It’ll be easier [with single-stream recycling] and more people will do it,” he said.

Along with curbside recycling and composting, the Bocks also ‘‘recycle” clothes, toys, books and board games by visiting and holding their own yard sales, and by donating to and buying from second-hand stores around Boulder.

Bock said her husband is a ‘‘master recycler” and that as a landlord, he has learned how to dig through what other people put out for trash and find treasure, such as re-useable clothes and bicycles.

Jim Bock said Boulder is unique, often having a reputation as being ‘‘a liberal island within a red state, and recycling is part of that.”

The Bocks know not everyone is willing, or maybe even able, to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as they do, and they know it will not happen overnight. But they hope that the movement will keep gaining ground.

‘‘If we can recycle, and if we can reuse, and if we cannot buy so much, and talk manufacturers into packaging differently, then maybe everyone can live in a cleaner environment,” Regina Bock said.