Tech Startup: Driven Plastics

Initial Lightbulb

Driven Plastics Chief Technology Officer Chris Wacinski encountered the problem with thin-film waste during his career in tech. He subsequently co-founded Driven Plastics with Chief Strategy Officer Marie Logsden, whose background in politics and communications was a good match for Wacinski’s technical savvy.

Founded in 2020, the company has developed a proprietary process with a product from Dow Chemical to manufacture an asphalt binder modifier from otherwise non-recyclable, single-use plastic bags. The process can upcycle up to 3 tons of plastic per lane-mile of road.

“Climate tech usually is either really expensive or it takes a hit on performance. It’s pretty hard to get both,” says Logsden. “When I realized that they could compete on price and even exceed the market leader on performance, and that they could divert such huge volumes, I was really, really excited about the product.”

A 30-year veteran of the asphalt industry, Mark McCollough joined the 10-employee Driven Plastics as CEO in late 2022. The company’s business headquarters are in Denver, and the production facility is in Pueblo.

In a Nutshell

Logsden says the startup opened her eyes to the complexities of road construction. “They’re really highly engineered, the materials are really expensive, and they’re very high-risk, because if you make a mistake, you can hurt people.”

Polymer-modified asphalt roads are favored in high-use areas and extreme climates. “They take a virgin plastic pellet, and they use a physics solution,” explains Logsden. “They use a high-shear mill to push that pellet into the material and make it stronger, and that has been a solution for roads that are under heavy stress for at least 50 years.”

“Our solution is a chemistry solution. We use waste plastic instead of virgin plastic, we mix it with a compatibilizer, and those two things link up in the asphalt matrix, and they make a more resilient material through chemistry, rather than through physics.”

The result is “a 5 to 10 percent reduction in the cost of maintenance over the life of the road,” says Logsden.“We meet or exceed the performance characteristics of that material on each of the criteria that are standard in the industry. The places where we exceed performance are on heavy loads and on heat.”

For large-scale projects, the construction cost can be nearly the same as conventional binders; the lower maintenance budget can make Driven Plastics’ solution more economical in the long term. “Dow has been doing research on this product for over 20 years,” says Logsden. “We have a lot of lab data, and we have over five years of field data.”

After recycling 80 tons of plastic in 2023, Driven Plastics is on track to recycle 250 tons in 2024, with a forecast of 600 tons in 2025. The company currently sources the majority of its plastic from TR Toppers, a Pueblo-based dessert supplier, with a strategy in place to scale with waste from distribution centers across the country.

Logsden says the company will be involved with more than 50 projects by the end of 2024, including a 1.75-mile stretch of Siloam Road in Pueblo County that diverted 13.5 tons of plastic.

“We’ve been through about two full seasons now where we had to deal with snow and plowing and the summer,” says Tanis Manseau, director of Pueblo County Public Works. “Everything’s performing exceptionally well.”

Due to that success, the county will use the binder in the construction of Medal of Honor Boulevard, a 3.2- mile long, four-lane expressway between Pueblo and the Pueblo West Metropolitan District that’s scheduled for completion in fall 2025. “We have a lot of confidence in the plastic binder, or obviously we would not be specifying it for a $33 million highway we’re getting ready to build,” says Manseau, noting that the product will be considered primarily for high-traffic roads.

The Market

“The estimated total annual market for polymer-modified roads in the U.S. is estimated at 196,500 miles of asphalt roadway, or $51.5 billion, and growing all the time,” says Logsden.

Financing

Driven Plastics raised $2.8 million in seed funding in early 2024. “We could be growing pretty methodically and growing with revenue, or we might decide to do a faster scaling and bring in some sort of outside funds,” Logsden says of future fundraising.