Goal: Reuse Resources in Colorado

iStock.com/Ogdum

The CEO and founder of Circular Colorado was motivated by a simple but powerful impulse when she launched the initiative several years ago.

“We are out here to operationalize and get things done,” says Laurie Johnson, who also serves as director of the Circular Economy Development Center, a program Circular Colorado was contracted by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to create and run. “We really are the boots on the ground to connect the dots between large corporations and manufacturers and the ecosystem.”

The Adams County region is home to innovative businesses that work directly with Circular Colorado to find new ways to reuse resources to maximize their value and minimize their impact on the environment. Among those area businesses is Pretred, an Aurora-based company that makes construction and traffic barriers out of waste tires.

The Colorado Circular Communities Enterprise recently awarded a multi-year $11.2 million grant to Pretred to expand its operations to process waste tires into crumb rubber – the main ingredient in traffic barriers made from recycled tires.

When they began evaluating the opportunity and investigated Pretred’s practices, Johnson says, they found Pretred was importing crumb rubber from out of state, despite the fact that Colorado has plenty of waste tires that could become the raw material for their products.

“But there was no crumb rubber facility here, so we put together a project to create a crumb rubber facility in the region,” Johnson says.

The project is a great example of the work Circular Colorado does to support manufacturers as they build circular economies and grow their businesses at the same time. Pretred’s expansion is expected to turn 4 million waste tires from across Colorado into 30,000 barriers each year.

“Our long-term goal is to create circular industrial campus model where we bring all this collaboration to one space,” Johnson says.