The state of Colorado is on a mission to improve recycling and composting end markets, and it’s using some show-biz flair to do so. Case in point: The NextCycle Colorado Pitch Competition, a sort of “Shark Tank” for Colorado-based entrepreneurs where nascent recycling-related businesses pitch their ideas to investors.

NextCycle Colorado, a business-accelerator program that supports manufacturing solutions for recycled or recovered content within the state, hosted the 2022 NextCycle Colorado Pitch Competition on June 22, 2022, in Boulder.

Funded by the Colorado Department of Public Health, NextCycle Colorado provides organizations with the resources and expertise needed to take their recycling and composting projects to the next level.

Nine teams participated in NextCycle’s 2022 pitch competition. A competitive application process was used to select the teams, whose ideas ranged from a hyperlocal compost operation to a quarry-waste recycling project.

Two of the teams had particularly intriguing pitches involving plastics: Trash Panda, a start-up that recycles trash into a product used in disc golf; and a duo of scientists from the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), who are recycling textile waste using a new approach to chemical recycling.

Trash Panda uses recycled plastic to manufacture small discs called minis, which are used as markers in tournament play of disc golf (aka frisbee golf), an increasingly popular sport.

In 2021, Trash Panda launched its first products — 100% recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) minis and polypropylene (PP) minis. Trash Panda founder and CEO Jesse Stedman initially produced the discs by hand on an injection molding machine he built in his garage.

By early 2022, the company was able to move its disc manufacturing from Stedman’s garage to the Denver plant of injection molder LTM Plastics. Trash Panda sources its feedstock (plastic regrind) from Denver-based recycler Direct Polymers.

Trash Panda plans a global launch of recycled full-sized discs in October 2022. Stedman expects that within the next five years, his company will be able to divert 200,000 pounds of easy- and hard-to-recycle plastics from landfills annually.

“We plan to make minis out of the most commonly produced plastics in our world, most likely anything from No. 1 to No. 6,” Stedman tells PlasticsToday. “Because Trash…