Colorado company uses plastic from Dillon Marina and turns it into roads
While a pile of polyethylene plastic wrap piled up in a storage shed for the Dillon Marina (from boats wrapped up in the off-season) Craig Simson, the "Mayor" of the Dillon Marina started looking for a place to put it.
Previously the supplier would take the plastic back and recycle it, but it became too costly, and the supplier simply stopped offering the service.
"We were on a mission to find someone to process this kind of plastic," Simson said. "Between the two marinas, (Dillon and Frisco) the rough math is we produce about 480,000 square feet of plastic annually. That didn't feel good to anyone that it could go into a landfill."
That's where Driven Plastics comes in. The Colorado-based company not only offered to take the plastic waste that no one else would, but it plans to put it back into our community in a safe and responsible way.
The company takes polyethylene 2 and 4 which are famously unwanted for its difficulty in recycling and then shreds the material, bonds it with a reactive elastomeric terpolymer, and creates something different altogether.
Driven Plastics had to rethink how plastics were traditionally used in our asphalt mixtures, using brand-new plastic to help glue asphalt together.
The issue with that is the plastic is still separate from the road itself, and when the road breaks down, microplastics are released into the environment.
The company says its product doesn't do that thanks to chemistry.
"The polymer binds inside the solution so it can't roll off," Marie Logsden, Founder, Lead Investor and CSO of Driven Plastics explained. The compound becomes a single unit down to a molecular level, and therefore can't splinter off into smaller plastic chunks.
They are calling it the next generation of asphalt paving.
"Last year, in our first year we did 80 tons of plastic, and this year we will do 260 tons," Logsden said. "As we scale that number is supposed to triple next year with the volume we have already sold. "
That's just fine for people like Simson who are desperately looking for a responsible, and cheap way to dispose of all the plastic he end up with each year that no one else will take, aside from the landfill.
"The fact that we kept collecting it and collecting it and collecting it... there was going to be a breaking point where we ran out of room so when this relationship came together it was perfect timing," Simson said with a smile on his face.
Aside from the environmental aspects, Driven Plastics said the roads built using its compound mixture hold up better too, thanks to signature adjustments to fit the environment they are placed in, and the simple chemical structure of the sticking compound itself.
"Better performance, cost competitive, and better for the environment, hard to beat!" Logsden said.
The company, headquartered in Pueblo, helped to create Siloam Road in the town, the longest road using recycled materials in North America, running 1.75 miles, and using 13.5 tons of plastic, which they said is the equivalent of 2.4 million grocery bags (which we no longer see often in Colorado, but doesn't mean they aren't still out there!)
Simson said he expects to stick with Driven Plastics for the foreseeable future.
"These guys are taking the plastic that no one else wants," Simson said. "Our stuff, as much as we try to keep it clean, a lot of recycling centers it has to be pristine clean or the wont take it."
