NORTHAMPTON — After its founding in 2002, it took the Pedal People cooperative 16 years to achieve the milestone of the 250,000th pickup for trash, recycling and compost from one of its human-powered collection bikes. On Monday, the co-op reached 500,000 pickups in less than half that time.

“It’s fantastic,” said Ethan Tupelo, one of the worker-owners that make up the Pedal People. “We’ve grown every year in our existence, both in terms of income and number of yearly pickups. This is just a sign that it’s continuing to grow.”

Though the sight of Pedal People cycling across Northampton pulling trailers full of wastebins has become a signature look of the city’s downtown, the cooperative originally started with just a handful of collections. Founded by Ruthy Woodring and Alex Jarrett (who also currently chairs the Northampton City Council), the two were inspired by a group of bikers in Ames, Iowa who ran a recycling collection business using bicycles.

“We were both car-free and used bikes a lot, and I dreamed of riding bikes as a profession,” Woodring said in an interview. “We knew we wanted to ride bikes and haul trash, not run a business.”

Since then, the worker-owned cooperative has expanded to 26 members who traverse across Northampton on bicycles, pulling trailers that can collect bins of trash, recycling and compost to bring to the city’s transfer stations. But it retains its goal to provide an alternative for transportation that does not rely on the use of fossil fuels, doing so in a socially equitable way by making all the workers also part owners in the cooperative.

“The worker ownership is pretty important for us. We make all of our decisions in monthly meetings, making decisions by consensus of the whole cooperative,” Tupelo said. “We collectively distribute the profits of the company at the end of each month to people based on how much they have worked, so the money isn’t split up by any other factor.”

As Northampton does not have municipal waste collection service, many residents sign on to use the Pedal People to collect their garbage, proving popular thanks to their locality and alternative methods that’s in keeping with the spirit of the city, workers at the co-op said.

In addition to collecting from individual residents, Pedal People has since 2007 been contracted with the city of Northampton to collect public trash and recycling from locations from downtown to areas in central Florence. Tupelo said the use of Pedal People for this task provides greater efficiency than the use of a standard garbage truck.

“It’s actually a lot quicker on a bike because you can just zip between pickups and not have to get in and out all of the time,” Tupelo said. “I think the other trash companies probably just don’t want to also, because it’s hassle for them to empty all of those bins in that way every single day, and for us it’s pretty easy.”

Besides trash and recyclables, Pedal People have also been hired to transport groceries, refrigerators and solar panels in the past. The cooperative serves most of Northampton as well as the northern section of Easthampton.

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.