Terracycle, a recycling company, has opened its largest distribution center in the United States in the former Henry Pratt facility in Aurora, the site of a tragic mass shooting in 2019. On Feb. 15, 2019, at the Henry Pratt Co. manufacturing plant in Aurora, an employee opened fire during a terminat ion meeting, killing five Pratt employees and wounding five police officers and an employee before he was killed in a shootout with police. Pratt has since moved its operations to Tennessee, and tax records show that it sold the Aurora site to Terracycle for $5.5 million in late 2022. A ribbon-cutting in October officially marked the newly-renovated building’s grand opening. Although Terracycle founder and CEO Tom Szaky said he didn’t know about the site’s history until after it was bought, it wouldn’t have concerned him. “We’re very big on recycling and reusing, and we want to also express that in the buildings we work from,” he said. Terracycle’s office spaces around the country use upcycled, recycled or reused materials for furniture and decor, according to the company’s website. The fully-renovated office space at the Aurora facility is no different — it even features a Terracycle logo made of recycled materials. The building, which is located at 401 S. Highland Ave., has had a “transformation,” Operations Manager Krista Voelkel told The Beacon-News during a tour of the facility. Terracycle has opened its largest distribution center in the country in the former Henry Pratt Co. facility in Aurora. (R. Christian Smith/The Beacon-News) The facility is now Terracycle’s largest distribution center in the United States, which is also the company’s largest market of the 20 countries it operates in, according to Szaky. He said his company often uses third parties for its operations, but this site is fully owned and operated by Terracycle. The company’s business model is all about collecting and doing something with waste, Szaky said, but it tries to only take on what traditional garbage companies don’t. Terracycle is known for recycling things that typically aren’t recyclable, including cigarette butts, coffee capsules and toothbrushes, he said. There’s a “waste crisis,” according to Szaky. For 25 years, he’s had a mission to figure out how to use business to combat the issue, he said. Aurora Mayor John Laesch, who attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony, said during a City Council meeting in November that Terracycle’s distribution center was “an excellent repurposing of the Henry Pratt building.” The company is bringing in about 50 jobs from the shop floor to the offices, he said at the time. A large box full of discarded coffee pods, one of the things Terracycle recycles, sits at the company's distribution center in Aurora. (R. Christian Smith/The Beacon-News) “This international, innovative green company understands that everything can be recycled, and they have a plan to do it,” Laesch said in a post about the company on the city of Aurora’s Facebook page. Terracycle offers a variety of different ways to recycle for individual customers and for businesses. Some come with a cost, but others are completely free through partnerships with companies like Gillette, Takis, Brita, Burt’s Bees and Febreze. The distribution center in Aurora not only prepares and sends out the boxes customers put their waste into, but it also accepts those boxes back. The Aurora facility takes in and processes between 500 and 1,000 boxes per day, according to Voelkel. Each gets scanned in so the waste can be tracked throughout the process. After a general sorting process that groups similar waste materials together, each box is then opened and hand-sorted to check for compliance. After the waste is sorted at the Aurora facility, it is sent to other sites for further processing. For example, metals are smelted for use in manufacturing, glass is crushed and melted to make new glass products or cement and concrete, rubber is powderized for flooring and organics are composted or used in fertilizer, according to the company’s website. Plastics are Terracycle’s most commonly-collected material, and those are shredded, sorted, cleaned and then turned into pellets, flakes or powder, the company’s website says. A display about the recycling of health and nutrition packaging seen at the Aurora facility shows that pellets made from this type of waste can be turned into park benches, garden beds and more. For Voelkel, it is fulfilling to know that the waste being processed for recycling at the Aurora facility could instead be filling up landfills, she said. [email protected] ...read more read less