Circular Economies Link Businesses In The Cause Of Reusing Waste

Photos courtesy of Business Incubator Center

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.

While Enstrom Candies was the first Western Slope business to participate in the CTN, Ritter is confident that more will follow. To help achieve this, Ritter shares that the BIC is exploring community aggregation where multiple businesses can combine their recyclables into the necessary volume for costeffective transport.

Currently, the materials accepted by the CTN are aluminum cans, cardboard, down-filled products, unshredded paper, plastic film, tin, and plastics #1 and #2. However, Ritter is open to any and all innovative suggestions.

“If you have a material you think can be reused, reach out to us, and we can either help you find the end market for it, or see if it might be able to fit into another one of our programs,” he shares.

It’s a pretty sweet — and sustainable — deal.

To learn more about the CEDC and the CTN, visit gjincubator.org/circulareconomy-development-center.

Originally published in the fall 2025 issue of Spoke+Blossom.