Recycling can feel pointless. Here are Colorado companies changing that. 

When a local mattress recycler said it was in a bind because its California buyer stopped accepting old mattress foam to turn into new carpet padding, we wondered: Why are they shipping tons of foam to California for recycling?

Answer: No one in Colorado processes that used material in bulk. 

That’s common for a wide variety of materials that consumers toss in their recycle bins. While processing used glass and aluminum are being handled in state, those are the exception. For other materials, Colorado’s recycling volume just isn’t large enough, so waste collectors must often transport material to facilities on either coast to get something old made into something new. 

However, a few companies do process the trickier things right here in Colorado and that ecosystem is growing partly due to public funding — and potential profit. The nonprofit Circular Colorado is working to connect the dots between waste collectors, recyclers, municipalities and end users in order to decrease how much waste is going into landfills. The state has been stuck at a 15.8% diversion rate, which means 15.8% of household and commercial waste going to landfills was recycled or composted in 2022. We could be recycling more than that but we don’t know because no one is really tracking recycling excluded from the diversion rate. 

Last year, Circular Colorado was awarded a multi-year contract to start figuring that out and mapping the recyclers to help the state better understand what is produced, what can be recycled and who needs help processing the waste. The state’s health department’s contract, valued at nearly $600,000 for the first year, is setting up a circular development center to do things like gather unwanted plastic and transporting it to local plastic processors to turn into something new. Once the pieces are together, the plan is to scale it larger and larger until we become a trashless society, like some European countries that hope to one day end all waste. 

☀️ RELATED

Is it recyclable in Colorado? Take our quiz.

We have 10 questions. How many can you get correct?

Read more

“The challenge is quantity,” said Laurie Johnson, who founded Circular Colorado in 2021. “Colorado has so many materials with that issue. We’re just not that big to command large-scale solutions that reduce the cost of processing.”

It’s only been one year and Johnson is juggling eight projects.

She’s prioritized materials that have been more challenging than mattresses to recycle: plastics, tires, textiles and roof shingles. Those have a higher tonnage ending up in Colorado landfills than mattresses, which she ranked as fifth on her list. She’s found many interesting processors here. She’s still working on shingles. There’s also a plan to set up a rail and trucking system to help recyclers access unwanted material collected from around the state and beyond — or haul stuff like mattresses on a more environmentally-friendly rail route to California.

“We’re brokering not only the relationships (between recyclers) but helping them with locations, the permits, the strategy,” Johnson said. “It’s like we’re putting all the players on the team together and then saying, ‘OK, you’re the quarterback, you’re the center, you’re the receiver.’ And then we go to the field.”

Here are the all stars:

The economics of recycling plastic

The process of recycling old plastic has two unexpected competitors: new plastic and the landfill. On one hand, a plastics recycler must consider the current cost of commoditized resin, or virgin plastic. When resin prices are low, recyclers must drop prices, too, even if handling, sorting and processing costs haven’t changed. 

But recyclers also need a supply of used plastic. If they can’t pay commercial clients enough for the waste, it’s cheaper for clients to send plastic to the dump. Those seemingly incongruous elements make the business of profitably recycling plastic in Colorado very rare.

That’s where Adam Hill found himself a few years ago. As founder of Direct Polymers Plastics Recycling, he began looking for ways to increase revenue beyond selling the tiny plastic pellets produced from old plastic at the company’s North Denver plant. 

“There’s definitely money in recycling but it goes in swings,” Hill said. “When you hit the point where it becomes difficult to recycle, companies exit the recycling world, they stop collection programs and you almost have to because of the volatility. You almost have to stop and restart. So what we’re trying to do is prevent those massive down swings.”

He found added revenue by accepting nearly every type of plastic. He found it in the data and in developing software to help the industry manage materials and track carbon emissions to show potential clients how costly and inefficient it is to ship unwanted plastic out of state. And he found it in employee ownership to retain a crew dedicated to scaling the business — from processing 1-to-1.5-million pounds a month currently to 4-to-5 million pounds a month. He hopes to become the regional plastics processor for Colorado and nearby states, and also provide more recycled plastic to regional manufacturers.

“I’m a big numbers person, and to me, this entire industry is all just pretty simple math,” said Hill, who studied economics at Duke University. “When I watched the material get handled and transported three different times to hit an end point when it should have only been one, I started to see the inefficiencies.”

Most of the plastic waiting to be processed comes from companies unloading a ton of the same thing. On a recent morning, there were bales of gallon milk containers, labels and all. Boxes of clear catheter tubes. Hundreds of trash cans. Flattened plastic children’s toys in bales, thanks to a partnership with Goodwill. Outside, a truckload of white PVC pipes was waiting to unload. Hard plastic only though — no flimsy grocery bags. Everything gets shredded into tiny pellets that are sold into the network for companies that make recycled goods.

Soon, Direct Polymers will be making products of its own. In a joint venture, they’ll manufacture composite railroad ties, made from a mix of A-grade and B-grade recycled plastic. Each railroad tie has 200 pounds of recycled plastic and one can be made every six minutes. Having new products for sale will boost profit margins, especially when commodity resin prices are low. 

“We’re still getting a grip on the timeline, but in 2026, we’ll be making products that utilize our own feedstock” of recycled plastic, Hill said. “When’s the last time you went to Home Depot and saw a plastic product go down in price? When you’re selling products, you tend to have a much higher margin. So we’re attempting to increase our margin, decrease the handling and logistics for these companies … get costs optimized with our processing and then build a good company culture that allows our people to want to remain here and make more money then they would anywhere else.”

Flimsy plastic bags can have an afterlife

Some days it smells like chocolate inside Driven Plastics’ recycling plant in Pueblo. But what the company is making out of used shrink wrap, plastic bags and other thin-film plastic is anything but tasty.

They’re turning all that used flimsy plastic — including empty candy bags from neighbor TR Toppers — into an additive for asphalt. The additive has been tested and shown to improve the road’s lifespan and it can cost less, compared to the non-recycled additive, said Marie Logsden, Driven Plastics’ founder and chief strategy officer. 

TR Toppers makes the candy and nut toppings commonly seen at frozen yogurt stores. The company goes through a lot of candy — they’re capable of chopping up “in excess of 250,000 pounds” a day, according to the Pueblo manufacturer. They provided empty candy bags to make up most of the 80 tons of thin plastic Driven Plastics processed last year. 

“All that candy comes in big bags that are contaminated with chocolate. For a lot of other recycling processors, that chocolate causes a problem in their machines and their end product. For us, it doesn’t cause a problem at all,” Logsden said. “We can handle a significant amount of organic material in our process and it actually smells like Reese’s Peanut Butter in the plant. Nobody minds too much at all.”

Commercial plastic wrap makes up the bulk of thin plastic waste that ends up in landfills because it gets caught in the recycling machines. But that’s exactly the material Driven Plastics, previously known as Ecologic Materials Corp., needs. They’ll also take plastic grocery bags, those blue-and-white Amazon mailers and other thin plastic. Trex, the composite decking-maker, also takes thin plastic but it needs to be clean, she said.

Driven Plastics uses a proprietary process to turn thin plastics into a dry flake that melts at the same temperature as asphalt. It’s then combined with a compatibilizer from The Dow Chemical Company and added to asphalt to reduce potholes and cracking and extends the life of the pavement, which could save taxpayers money on road maintenance, she said. 

Two years ago, Driven Plastics and the county of Pueblo did their first road test. They used recycled plastic to help pave a nearly two-mile, two-lane stretch of Siloam Road in Pueblo County. The county’s public works department liked it so much, it added another six miles of road using polymerized asphalt last year and is already working on the Medal of Honor Boulevard, a 3.3-mile, four-lane strip connecting Pueblo and Pueblo West, with an expected completion date of Fall 2025.

“The cost is comparable,” said Karim Ayoub, a project manager at the county’s Public Works Department. “The reason we decided to stick to it is our commitment towards sustainability. …It’s an elegant solution because you’re actually turning it into a component that makes a roadway more lasting.”

A one-mile, one-lane road “diverts up to 10 tons of plastic,” Logsden said.

The company, which has raised about $1.8 million in friends-and-family investment rounds, has big plans. Logsden said they already have installed 22 projects around the country and will be closer to 60 by the end of the year. 

Last year was the company’s first year of full production and they’re about to add a second shift in Pueblo, which will double manufacturing staff to six or up to 10 during peak demand.

Now, they just need to find more plastic waste. 

“There are a number of different ways as we increase our volume that we are going to need to source plastic,” Logsden said. “And that’s why the Colorado Circular Economy Development Center is so critical because the less time we spend hunting around for waste and brokering deals with 14 different partners, the more of this product we can make, the more stable it is because it becomes profitable. So, it’s super important for us to scale and for our feedstock to be consistent.”

Old tires hit the road again

Colorado is known, at least in some circles, for having the largest tire dumps in the nation that end up getting incinerated to become tire-derived fuel. That’s not great for air quality. Hence, tires are high on Circular Colorado’s list. The Aurora company Pretred Inc. is working to find new life for the old rubber.

CEO and engineer Eric Davis started down the recycled tire path after seeing a bunch of wasted tires in a stream where he was fly fishing. The end result? Road barriers to replace concrete that pretty much every construction site or road crew utilizes. Pretred opened its first manufacturing facility in 2022 near the Denver airport.

“Tires are typically either burned (or) they’re put into the landfill,” said Toni Olson, a spokeswoman for Pretred and Davis’ neighbor. “Our customers love the fact that you can use them as perimeter (blockades) and they’re much more bumper-friendly if a truck runs into it.”

The 6-foot wide barriers are 1,700 pounds and contain about 70 tires. They’re made by shredding tires into what’s called “tire crumb,” and then binding it together with a proprietary formula. One mile of Pretred barriers diverts approximately 1.4 million pounds of waste tires from the landfill, Olson said. 

But compared to building concrete barriers, the rubber ones have a 283% less carbon impact, according to an company-commissioned environmental-impact study. That’s credited to using less water and recycled tires instead of virgin material.  

Pretred estimates the potential market for its road barriers is $6 billion just for road construction. It’s in the process of getting U.S. Department of Transportation certification so its barriers are approved for highway construction. That process includes safety testing by driving a truck into the barriers at certain speeds and measuring the damage. 

But the barriers are also being used by the private sector and don’t need DOT certification. One customer is building a new data center.

“They purchased 800 recycled rubber barriers, which is over 60,000 waste tires that are being repurposed for that one project,” Olson said. “That’s over 1.3 million pounds that are now being diverted from burning or burying.”

While the cost of the recycled barrier is similar to a concrete one, there’s more savings if the buyer or construction site is located in Colorado, for obvious reasons. Transporting them out of state can become costly. Pretred is already considering adding East Coast and West Coast manufacturing plants to address that issue, “and then we can also take the local waste and process it,” she said. “So it’s a win-win.”

The recycler behind North Face, Patagonia, Dr. Martens and other tossed textiles

What began as a better dry cleaning machine 15 years ago has morphed into Tersus Solutions, an Englewood company that counts Patagonia, The North Face, REI and two dozen other brands as customers of its “recommerce” service. 

They clean and repair used clothing that is resold back to consumers through programs like North Face Renewed.

CEO Peter Whitcomb calls “a higher form of recycling,” since the clothing doesn’t require much processing and returns to the retail life like new. 

But this is far more than a vintage clothing shop or thrift store. This is massive. 

Last year, Tersus, which employs 57 people, processed more than 1 million used items of clothing and other textiles, which translates to about 1.5 million pounds of old fleece jackets, worn shoes and T-shirts from getting dumped in a landfill. That’s a big increase from what its technology partner Archive noted in a 2022 case study for The North Face Renewed program: “72,000+ items processed in first 6 months.” (Yes, that was all Tersus and its team of 57 employees in the Denver area, and Archive isn’t its only client.)

“We’re on track to grow that amount by over 30% this year,” Whitcomb said. 

Consumers can also find Tersus-touched products at the Dr. Martens ReWair, women’s clothier M.M. LaFleur’s Second Act and New Balance’s Reconsidered, to name a few. 

Additionally, Tersus accepts down jackets, sleeping bags, pillows and comforters that can’t be cleaned and repaired. At a facility in the River North neighborhood in Denver, Tersus employees extract the down feathers, clean them with the CO2 technology, which “restores the loft of the down and improves the fill power and sterilizes the down,” he said. 

Certified by the Global Recycling Standard, the down is sold back into the U.S. supply chain as a raw material.

☀️ Related

What’s Working: Where to get rid of hard-to-toss items in Colorado — and also benefit society 

From old couches and mattresses to baby gear, paint and contact lenses, these Colorado organizations want your old stuff to help the planet, consumers and an underused workforce.

Read more

“All of the businesses are still very nascent, but growing given the tailwinds from both brands and the end consumer who are demanding more circularity from brands and retailers,” Whitcomb said. “It’s profitable for us and it’s profitable for our partners.”

But wait, there’s more! Tersus also decontaminates firefighter gear, which often gets trashed after coming into contact with carcinogens. Attempts to clean contaminated gear with water have not been effective. 

“We’re really the only company in North America who does all of these services under one roof so a brand or their customers can send us directly from their closet any time of used item and we’ll find a path forward effectively. More often than not, we want to try to resell it because that’s the best way to recapture the value of that made item,” he said. “But if not, we try to recycle it ourselves.”