Durango’s Phoenix Recycling has been granted a permit by La Plata County to build a combined wood waste recovery yard and compost facility on County Road 307.
“In a perfect world, we hope to address the problem of highly biodegradable materials going into the landfill and producing methane with the increased desire in the local community to mitigate forest fire risk,” Phoenix Recycling owner Mark Thompson said.
Thompson said he hopes to break ground on the roughly 15-acre development, which will be located across the street from Williams Ignacio Natural Gas Plant, some time next year, although dates are not yet finalized. He anticipates the project costing between $1 and $2 million, and plans are in the works to hire several additional employees to help operate the facility.
The county permitting process took about three years, Thompson said, and ongoing state-level recycling management changes are expected to continue to consume time and attention as the planning and construction process moves forward.
The permit allows for a wide range of biodegradable materials to be composted, including biosolids; biodegradable plastic packaging; biodegradable wood fibers; animal carcasses and food and food processing waste.
Thompson said the goal with the facility is to provide the community with better and more accessible long-term options than landfilling when it comes to discarding their biodegradable waste.
The facility will join a small number of similar operations currently serving the La Plata County area.
Table to Farm Compost, which focuses on food waste, has operated since 2016, and the Bayfield Transfer Station on County Road 223 also accepts compost waste – specifically pine needles, branches and pinecones – and grounds the material into free mulch for residents.
Thompson said the new facility will combine two waste streams into an eco-friendly solution in one location.
“We take two liabilities, two negatives, two waste streams – the stuff that we’re landfilling, and then the stuff that we’re taking out of the forest that we don’t really have a good use for – and we take these two problems, we add air, water and time, and we get a high quality compost product at the end of all that,” he said. “So, we’ve mitigated two problems and created one valuable product.”
The plan is to produce the compost product at a high volume, he said.
“We’re hoping to take large volumes of waste, produce large volumes of compost, and ship it out to large volume end users, because at the end of the day for us, it’s really about how many tons you can divert – because that’s what reduces the climate emissions,” he said.
The plan is to sell the compost created by the waste in large quantities to high volume end users like the Colorado Department of Transportation, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, various oil companies in the region who have oil and gas drill pads that need to be reclaimed or remediated, and various mine reclamation projects, he said.
“The scale that we’re talking about doing this at is somewhat mind boggling, and so we’re not really looking so much to put it in little plastic baggies and sell it at the garden supply shop,” he said.
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