Colorado generates more than 7 million waste tires annually. Pretred manufactures premier rubber barriers made from recycled waste tires. Crumb rubber is the main ingredient in recycled tire products. Currently, Colorado does not have the infrastructure or companies willing to produce the volume of crumb necessary to supply Pretred. Pretred imports crumb rubber from other states to make their barriers.

The goal of this project is for the CEDC to assist Pretred in establishing a Colorado based facility to process waste tires into the feedstock needed to produce industrial rubber barriers, thus establishing Colorado as the first state to fully realize a truly circular waste tire model.

Construction and demolition (C&D) waste makes up more than 30% of the material going to landfill in Colorado, even though this waste stream contains a high-volume of recoverable materials including wood, metal, concrete, asphalt, cardboard, plastics, and drywall, Due to a lack of full-scale, dedicated C&D sorting and recycling facilities these materials end up in the landfill, even though they could be cost-effectively reused or recycled with the right infrastructure.

The goal of this project is for the CEDC to assist Iron Woman in establishing a full-scale C&D recycling center in South Denver, providing an urgently needed solution to support local ordinances, regional diversion goals, and the advancement of circular material markets. It will recover high-value materials such as treated and untreated wood, drywall, asphalt, concrete, cardboard, metal, and plastics.

Today, most of Colorado’s textile waste is landfilled or exported, contributing to resource depletion, greenhouse gas emissions, and missed opportunities for local job creation and the creation of a circular economy for textiles. The state has multiple organizations with collection and sorting infrastructure and some start-up companies exploring advanced recycling and other technologies to deal with textile waste, but the state lacks a major processor to turn the textile waste into a textile resource for new manufacturing. Colorado is home to the outdoor industry and 100s of large events that also produce a large amount of textile waste with no outlet for recycling.

The goal of this project is for the CEDC to work with a third party to establish the first large-scale textile-to-fiber mechanical recycling system in Colorado, providing a solution for textiles that cannot be reused by processing them in-state into reusable fiber feedstock.

There is no statewide data on the amount of plastic waste that is generated and recycled each year in Colorado. However, based on national data and local waste audits, we estimate the amount generated to be somewhere in the range of 600,000-900,000 tons annually, with less than 10% being recycled. The percentage recycled is expected to increase in the coming years with the implementation of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation; however, we have very limited end markets at this time in Colorado.

The CEDC is currently working on a project assisting a manufacturing company that makes a coated textile in establishing a full-scale manufacturing facility in Colorado. At present, the company manufactures its product overseas using virgin polypropylene. Polypropylene is estimated to be 15-20% of plastic waste generated. With this project, the company will begin manufacturing in Colorado and using recycled polypropylene in its manufacturing process, thus providing an end-market for polypropylene in Colorado and advancing the use of a fully recyclable product to replace its non-recyclable competition.

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Almost 90 thousand tons of electronics and batteries or “e-waste” are going to the landfill each year in Colorado, despite a Colorado state law that bans the disposal of e-waste from landfills. Devices with batteries are a significant and growing category of e-waste, with some estimates as high as 50%. In addition, they are also one of the most hazardous, resource-intensive, and economically challenging forms of e-waste. Of equal importance, we are not recapturing the value of those devices, which include critical minerals, ferrous and non-ferous metals and plastics. The critical minerals are an especially valuable resource as they are needed to keep up with the ever-growing demand for batteries and to help reduce our reliance on foreign supply chains.

The goal of this project is to establish a recycling facility within CO that utilizes a mechanical shredding technology that can safely and cost-effectively shred devices with batteries in them, which will not only increase the diversion rate of e-waste, but also allow Colorado to gain the economic value of its e-waste rather than shipping it out of state or out of the country.