Brower builds careers on rockets and recycling

Laura Brower built the first prototype of a new plastic separation system in her backyard.

The aerospace engineer, 33, had a passion for reducing waste and an engineer's drive to solve problems.

“I was basically just doing research; I was really interested in getting all of the stuff out of the trash,” Brower said. “It just bothered me a lot that you could walk down a street in a strip mall and just see disposable plastic overflowing recycling bins, and you know that's happening all over the world.”

Brower founded Recycle Projects in 2012. Based in Boulder, Colo., the nonprofit's current focus is its Lifecycle Plastics program, dedicated to closing the loop on disposable, food-grade plastic in the United States.

The technology Brower developed is a density separation system for dividing different types of food-grade container plastic, similar to sink-float washing tanks already used in recycling centers. Her version uses liquids of different densities to separate the various polymers after they've been washed, producing a higher-quality product.

Simply stated, its ultimate goal is to turn recycled cups back into new cups.

Getting the project off the ground took some old-fashioned shoe-leather approach — facility tours, cold calls, research, store visits, asking for participation. Brower enlisted local Starbucks stores to collect discarded cold-drink cups, often tossed in trash bins on a customer's way out the door.

“I'm kind of a ‘go' person,” Brower said. “I didn't really wait until I figured out the solution in its entirety before starting this program. I was just like, you know what, Step 1 is I need to dangle a carrot in front of the big guys and show that this material can be collected, and I just went and started doing that.”

As she gradually filled out the supply chain, she teamed up with several collaborators, including a manufacturer willing to test the recovered product.

Though she was able to prove the concept and the project is ongoing, Brower said she learned the potential pitfalls of trying to do too much. While launching Recycle Projects, she retained her day job at Ball Aerospace.

“I've worked two jobs throughout this whole thing,” she said. “When you love something, you do not care at all if you make money doing it, or that's how I am anyway. And it was a lot easier to start this up without trying to pull a paycheck out of it — it obviously took a lot of the stress and pressure off to not have to rely on getting a paycheck out of this — so I have been working two jobs for quite a while now. And it was a bad idea.

“It took such a toll on my health and on the project's. It was hard to work both jobs, get enough sleep, and be healthy enough to make good decisions all the time.”

Both jobs were important to Brower, but she recognized some changes she could make to moderate their pressures, and she made them.

Brower received a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Purdue University in 2006, and a master's in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado in 2008.

“One of the things I really love, and one of the reasons I do my aerospace job is that I get to learn a lot, and I get to learn a lot of things in a lot of detail,” she said. “I like diving to really deep depths and gaining a very intricate knowledge base on chemistry and physics and how to construct something.

“Aerospace really feeds that side of me, because you have to go down to these levels of detail, and I just found that in recycling it was very natural for me to do that, and it seemed to surface a lot of really potentially simple solutions for people who maybe just weren't looking hard enough.”

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