From Spoke and Blossom – Fall 2025
In June 2025, an empty truck arrived at Enstrom Candies to pick up a load for transport to the Front Range. It wasn’t a load of delicious toffee or chocolates, but, instead, a load of plastic film.
Plastic can be tricky to recycle, and plastic film is often bound for the landfill. Yet while this film is a waste material at Enstrom, it’s a necessary commodity at Driven Plastics in Lakewood, Colorado, where it’s used as aggregate in asphalt manufacturing.
Ordinarily, it would be long odds that a world-famous candy maker and an eco-asphalt producer would partner in building a supply chain. But this cooperation is one example of an effort in Colorado to create circular economies connecting businesses and manufacturers so that one company’s waste can become another company’s treasure.
According to Mike Ritter, economic development director for the Business Incubator Center (BIC) in Grand Junction, this effort began in 2022 when the legislature established the Circular Economy Development Center (CEDC) with a mission to grow and create markets for recyclable and reusable materials.
“We realized that transportation is the largest barrier in recycling, especially in a state like ours,” Ritter says. “We’re so geographically unique in that we have a giant mountain that separates us.” The solution is a statewide Circular Transportation Network (CTN), which facilitates a “backhaul model” of trucking in which a truck picks up a new load, rather than returning empty after dropping off its original cargo.