Pretred Wins 2026 Emerging Manufacturer Award
Pretred has won the 2026 Emerging Manufacturer Award at the Colorado Manufacturing Network Awards, recognizing the company’s innovation in transforming end-of-life tires into sustainable rubber barriers.
The Emerging Manufacturer Award recognizes companies and individuals creating new products, services or business models and using innovation to build growing manufacturing businesses. Pretred was selected as the 2026 winner from a group of Colorado manufacturers representing a wide range of industries.
Building Something New From a Major Waste Problem
End-of-life tires have long presented a difficult recycling challenge, largely due to a lack of viable end markets. Pretred set out to address the problem from the demand side, creating a high-value, high-volume product that provides a new end market for recycled tire rubber.
Pretred manufactures recycled rubber barriers from waste tires as a sustainable alternative to traditional concrete barriers. Every Pretred barrier contains at least 95% recycled material and repurposes approximately 70–200 waste tires, depending on barrier size.
The environmental benefits extend beyond tire diversion. A 2023 independent environmental impact assessment by Boundless Impact Research & Analytics found that Pretred’s Standard Black Barrier has a carbon-negative cradle-to-gate greenhouse gas footprint of –107 g CO₂e per pound of product, compared with +58.8 g CO₂e per pound for the conventional concrete barrier evaluated in the study. The assessment attributed Pretred’s negative footprint primarily to the use of recycled tire rubber and the avoided emissions associated with diverting waste tires from landfills and incineration.
The company’s 150,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Aurora, Colorado has the capacity to divert more than 100 million pounds of tire waste annually, giving Pretred the ability to address this waste challenge at scale while producing high-performance infrastructure products.
Recognition for Colorado Manufacturing Innovation
Winning the Emerging Manufacturer Award recognizes both the product Pretred has created and the manufacturing model behind it. The company is taking a difficult waste stream and transforming it into a durable, commercially viable product, demonstrating how circular manufacturing can create new markets for materials that might otherwise be landfilled or incinerated.
That is particularly important in Colorado, where millions of waste tires are generated each year and developing viable end markets remains a key part of the state’s tire recycling challenge. For Pretred, the award is another milestone as the company expands its manufacturing capacity, grows the market for recycled rubber barriers and continues building its operations in Colorado.
Thank you to the Colorado Manufacturing Network Awards, Manufacturer’s Edge, AC-REP, Warehouse Business Accelerator, our customers, partners and everyone who has supported Pretred.
As Pretred continues to grow, the focus remains the same: turning one of the world’s most persistent waste streams into valuable infrastructure products and proving that recycled materials can outperform traditional alternatives.