Boulder recycling incubator looking for ideas

BOULDER — Coloradans have a reputation for worshipping their jagged mountain peaks, pine forests and rolling plains. In fact, they love land.

The Recycling Development Incubator (RDI), an organization created by Boulder-based Eco-Cycle, says Coloradans’ love for land extends to landfills and give little credibility or thought to end-use recycling markets.

“We have a lot of land,´ said Bud McGrath, RDI’s business development director. “And there is a subliminal attitude of ‘let’s build another landfill.'”

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These attitudes of a largely rural population are changing thanks to RDI, Eco-Cycle and the Environmental Protection Agency.

RDI, founded by Executive Director of Eco-Cycle Eric Lombardi in 1997 courtesy of the EPA’s “Jobs Through Recycling” program, combats traditional attitudes by creating, assisting and financing new businesses that manufacture products from recycled materials, McGrath said.

Receiving its first grant from the EPA in 1997 for $230,000 and an additional $60,000 from the Governor’s Office of Energy Conservation the same year, RDI was able to locate and assist businesses interested in tapping into the underrepresented recycling market in Colorado and surrounding states.

This second grant, a $150,000 prize from the EPA awarded in September, established the RDI Consortium — a team of powerful business assistance partners that will consult fledging businesses through the development phase and help corral the funding necessary to manufacture their environment-friendly products.

The grant marks the largest awarded to an organization under the “Jobs Through Recycling” program this year, McGrath said.

“With the first grant we assisted 52 businesses,” McGrath said. “And we provided grant money to 14 businesses with the second grant.”

“The mission of RDI is to provide business assistance and financing to achieve higher landfill diversion rates,” McGrath said. “We help these businesses start or expand.”

The plan is much easier said than done. The scope of RDI and the resources of Eco-Cycle are trying to foster an industry that does not exist in Colorado.

“This is the kind of idea that takes years to develop,” Lombardi said. “I consider this a 10-year project, and I’m pleased that the EPA is supporting us through our first four years.”

Lombardi said the process is laborious and many problems arise because the state has not recognized landfills as a measure of our failure in the West.

“The state must come forward and say that landfills are not the preferred future of our Colorado,” Lombardi said. “Recycling creates nine jobs for every one created by a landfill.”

Lombardi and McGrath said they both feel Colorado can become the West’s recycling development nucleus.

The RDI Consortium, so far, is walking one potentially successful company through the “evaluation” phase, but RDI has already helped make many recycling companies gain national recognition.

This phase rates the strengths of a new company’s business plan and marketing strategy, while addressing the company’s weaknesses. The hope is to create a magnetic company worthy of hefty investment.

According to Lombardi and McGrath, recycling firms throughout Region VIII are inhibited by the state’s lack of funding, high market risk and high transportation costs of recycled goods to other out-of-town markets.

“There is not a lot of support to value our large amount of land,” McGrath said, “We are rural so there are not many people and we have to travel further. This is why RDI is trying to create local markets.”

The EPA Region VIII branch, with its hub in Denver, oversees state environmental activities in Wyoming, Montana, Utah, South Dakota and North Dakota.

Great Western Creations is one such business putting recyclable material to work and out of the waste stream, McGrath said. The company makes “the Cadillac of ice scrapers” from acrylic discarded by the medical industry. RDI hopes to turn Great Western into a large manufacturer, creating an end-use for medical waste.

Priority No. 1 for RDI, however, is the glass and plastic markets.

“We have a huge waste stream but no where to put it,” McGrath said.

Lombardi said he agrees that plastic recycling is paramount to the success of keeping waste out of the landfills.

“If the economics of recycling were better we could do better,” Lombardi said. “Get rid of government subsidies to virgin plastics, and recycled plastics can compete.”

He added that the state should require each county to develop a landfill diversion plan and grease the gears of those plans with money collected from countywide garbage taxes.

For now, McGrath, said RDI will continue to assist and fund local entrepreneurs, and hammer away at the state’s negative recycling attitude.

Lombardi said he is still riding the high of Eco-Cycle’s groundbreaking of its new facility in Boulder just north of Arapahoe Avenue and 63rd Street.

Slated to open in April of 2001, the new center will be indoors and offer cutting-edge recycling technology for all of Boulder County. Since 1976, Eco-Cycle has been the nation’s largest outdoor recycling center.

“Business development is tough and slow,” Lombardi said. “We want entrepreneurs to come to us with a ideas. People need to know we’re here and that we’re a resource.”