Waste Management's $100 million Denver East sorting center aims to boost Colorado recycling

Trash and recycling giant WM is betting big on a surge in Colorado’s “circular economy,” with earthmovers already scraping ground on a $100 million complex just south of the Denver-Arapahoe landfill featuring high-tech recycling sorters and hauling trucks running on compressed natural gas.

Gov. Jared Polis and local officials helped break ground for the complex Monday, praising the investment as a key to Colorado keeping more useful commodities out of landfills and boosting a new industry remaking recycled materials into fresh products.

But construction is already well underway at the WM (formerly known as Waste Management) site, which will turn single-stream recycling from the metro area into enormous bales of reusable commodities like plastic gallon bottles, aluminum cans or cardboard boxes.

It was Polis who signed the bill in 2022 creating a “producer responsibility” fee that some of the state’s largest consumer goods manufacturers will charge themselves on packaging in order to fund expanded curbside recycling and new recycled-goods industries around Colorado.

Companies like Coca-Cola, Molson Coors and Colgate-Palmolive will pay into the fund based on small percentages of their packaging costs, and an appointed board will distribute the money with oversight from the state public health department.

Creating the producer fee and expanded recycling made Colorado a leader nationally, Polis said at the groundbreaking. Before the new recycling and circular economy push, Colorado lagged behind other progressive states in the amount of waste diverted from landfills through recycling and composting.

“Of course we have a long way to go, and this facility will be a big part of it,” Polis said.

WM has dozens of acres left on the open site to expand current recycling and reuse businesses, and to attract other partners, said director of planning development Jason Chan. The Denver East site will be a “campus” for recycling and potential circular economy industries, he said.

Company officials said they have not received any state or local incentives for the construction or for job creation. WM, which also manages the Denver Arapahoe Disposal landfill that is a growing mountain north of the new recycling center, said the sorting and hauling centers will process 168,000 tons of materials annually.

At the groundbreaking, WM set out bales of previously sorted materials showing the company recycled 21,700 tons of plastic last year in Colorado, as well as 94,000 tons of paper and 6,550 tons of aluminum cans.

The company is a multinational, publicly traded firm worth $83 billion, and is the largest waste-hauling and recycling company in Colorado. The advanced equipment in the new sorting facility means only about six hand-sorting employees are needed at any one time, a WM official said, mostly to pull odd-size or nonrecyclable materials off the conveyors.

Optical sorters take flimsy plastic film and bags out of the stream, preventing clogging of machinery that plagues many recycling and composting sites. The separators include air jets to blow out lighter plastics. Massive barrel-shaped magnets pull separate metal cans into useful streams.

Glass that breaks and gets crushed in the single-stream process is regathered by a high-tech cleanup system, the company said.

Cities up and down the Front Range are expanding recycling opportunities and requirements. Denver is still rolling out carts for a massive revision of its program, where residents now pay a monthly fee that rises by the size of trash cart they pick; recycling and composting bins are then provided “free.”

Not all neighborhoods have received the green composting carts yet, and are receiving a monthly discount off their waste fee until they do.

WM said the Denver East facility does not handle City of Denver resident recycling, but does sort some Denver business recycling. The methane produced from decomposing garbage in the landfill is collected in dozens of wells and burned onsite at an electrical generator that sends power to the Xcel grid.

Recycling centers and compost operations are still struggling to educate consumers on what items go where in the waste stream. Plastics and glass can contaminate composting loads and ruin entire sections of composted soil.

Consumers face confusing information on whether cardboard can be recycled if it’s a greasy pizza box, or what to do with hard-to-recycle items like plastic bags or spent batteries. WM plans to complete construction of the new facilities by the second quarter of 2026.