Jesse Stedman has a diversion project underway in south Denver. Plastics that might have been labeled as waste and thrown into a dumpster are instead being refashioned and thrown into a disc golf basket.
Stedman started playing disc golf in 2008, as a ninth grader in Northern California. Over time, he started to put the pieces together: “There are usable materials ending up in landfills and we’re creating new materials from nonrenewable resources that are gonna run out,” he said. “So why don’t we use this stuff that’s already in existence first?”
He waited for a decade thinking someone else would eventually put the same pieces together. Eventually he decided he needed to take the future into his own hands and create it.
In 2020, he asked himself that fateful question: “How hard could it be?”
Stedman, now living in Littleton and working in marketing, started assembling his first injection machine in his garage and quickly learned how little he knew about plastic. The machine consisted of a series of heating elements that would melt plastic and then, using his body weight, force the molten plastic into a small mold.
“I thought, ‘I’ll make a disc out of recycled plastic in my garage,’” he said. “Turns out it’s impossible.”
One of the biggest problems was that he started off with No. 2 plastic, also known as HDPE (high-density polyethylene). “At that point, I thought plastic was plastic,” he said. “I thought this Tide detergent bottle feels kind of grippy, kind of flexible, probably makes a great disc. It makes a terrible disc.”
It was too fragile and too rigid for throwing into trees, as often happens in disc golf, and not grippy enough. That Tide detergent bottle might be good for a reusable six-pack topper, or even an Ultimate Frisbee.
Nonetheless, he decided to offer for sale disc golf minis, which are used during a round of disc golf to mark the player’s lie, as is done in actual golf. He opened up orders to the public and eventually capped them at 5,000, and Trash Panda Disc Golf was officially born. The name is a term for raccoons and particularly a reference to their habit of digging through dumpsters and trash cans — a nod to Stedman’s ambition to take plastic out of the waste stream and put it back into use.
He immediately saw that he needed to scale his manufacturing process. The homemade injection machine required a lot of upper-body strength to press the plastic into the mold, and then a dead lift to pull it back up. He started off being able to make one mini every 30 minutes, gradually working up to seven mini discs every 30 minutes.
“That’s not if the machine breaks,” Stedman said. “That machine would break constantly. And I don’t know why I had high quality control standards as I was making it in the garage, but I did. So that was assuming they all came out with high quality control, too.”
A worker pours red recycled plastic grains into a mold at Trash Panda in Denver. (Handout)
He also started prototyping full-size, playable discs, which took a long time as he learned about the esoteric world of plastic formulations.
“I tried No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 (plastics),” he said. “And just because HDPE is No. 2 doesn’t mean there aren’t hundreds of variations of HDPE out there, all engineered for specific uses. So I was trying everything, it was taking so long and I thought, ‘Well, I can at least make a mini and I could sell that because a mini doesn’t have the performance aspect.’ It could be hard, it could be rigid, it could be slick.”
A discerning player will recognize minuscule variations in the hardness or flexibility of the plastic.
“A lot of people who are not disc golfers just have a general assumption or stereotype that it’s just a hippie who smokes weed who loves the planet. And that’s just not the reality anymore,” Stedman said. “There’s a very professional side of the sport that’s looking for performance above all else, and we have to be able to match performance. If we can make a 100% recycled, performance-based product for quite a demanding consumer, then what else can be done with recycled plastic?”
Finally! A competitive disc is born!
The hallway at Trash Panda is lined with milestones in his production process, some more photogenic than others. Steadman points out the first-ever disc.
“This is that Tide detergent bottle plastic, and it’s super slick,” he said. “It’s super stiff. The mold itself doesn’t feel good.”
Further on is a series of four full-size R&D discs that he made over the course of a year and a half, while also making thousands of minis. Down the hall a little farther, he points to a disc that more closely resembles a real disc-golf disc — the first he made with TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane).
“No one for 30-plus years, 40 years, had said they were making discs out of TPU,” Stedman said. “I didn’t know that I could just start there, and that’s what made a good disc.”
Professional disc golfer Anthony Bodanza trims Candy Catch Inner Core discs he designed with Trash Panda. (Handout)
He put out their first competitive disc, the Inner Core putter, in November 2022, working with a local contract manufacturer and selling 10,000 discs in that release.
“That was just a hit right away,” Stedman said. He moved to a warehouse space near Dahlia Street and Interstate 70 in 2022, then was able to bring molding in-house in 2024, when Trash Panda moved into the current production space on South Platte River Drive.
The heating units and lever-driven injector from his garage have been upgraded to a 180-ton clamping machine and a 220-ton clamping machine — all that force is necessary to seal the mold properly so that the discs don’t come out with a thin ribbon of plastic around the seam. The small aluminum block he used for a mold in his garage was replaced with a 700-pound piece of steel with a disc-shaped cutout in the middle — one steel mold for each type of disc that Trash Panda offers.
“They’re expensive chunks of steel, but we have one of those molds that we’re about to hit 200,000 opens and closes on,” Stedman said.
TPU is a very durable material, used for things like shoe soles, cattle tags, phone cases, and increasingly in 3D printing. There isn’t a lot of TPU available through post-consumer avenues — waste streams that would come out of recycling programs after a product is used, like his No. 2 Tide bottle did.
However, there’s more TPU available in industrial waste from trim, scraps, out-of-spec, and excess inventory. A lot of the cattle tags used domestically are produced nearby, Stedman said, and Trash Panda also has discs speckled with pieces of phone cases meant for phone releases that have come and gone.
But there’s no just-in-time supply chain optimization or lean manufacturing when it comes to saving materials that are outbound to the landfill.
“Space is more valuable than plastic to a lot of people, so it’s actually cheaper for them to throw it away and have the space than it is to keep it or to make sure it gets recycled,” Stedman said.
But when Trash Panda needs it, it’s there.
“The whole disc golf industry could convert to recycled TPU and we still wouldn’t have touched what’s out there,” he said.
Trash is cheap. The gear to transform it is not.
Trash Panda discs are embossed in the south Denver workshop. (Handout)
Just because it’s a waste stream doesn’t mean it’s cheaper. The price of a 700-pound steel mold is dwarfed by the labor costs that go into making a product out of recycled TPU.
Making a product using injection-molded plastic is all about consistency, he said. If he were using virgin plastic, it would arrive in small Dippin’ Dots-size beads and have clear, well-defined specifications that he could rely on when fine-tuning the near-infinite number of combinations of production variables including temperature, speed, pressure and cooling temperature.
Instead, Stedman and the small Trash Panda production team are essentially running an R&D process on every batch of TPU they receive to figure out how to calibrate the machines for it.
“The costs you save in the plastic are then exponentially added on in the processing, in the manufacturing, in the scrap, in the trial and error, the R&D, etc.,” he said. “When you’re optimized for the bottom line, you’re not going to be able to recycle plastic like this because it costs to shut down the machine and test and run a day of failed discs.”
His recycled TPU arrives in batches as small as 40 pounds, while large manufacturers are working with batches 1,000 times larger, sometimes running the same plastic for a year straight.
“When you use plastic that’s 100% recycled, you kind of put your middle finger to the consistency of plastic,” he said.
In addition to being an unknown formulation, his plastic comes in with an unknown amount of moisture in it. It hasn’t been properly dried then the water will boil off and form air bubbles when the plastic is injected, creating “a lump that can only be sent to the landfill,” Stedman said.
“No one suggests that you make a product with 100% recycled plastic. A hundred percent recycled is unheard of — 25% recycled is high, 30%, 40%, 50%, that’s really high. I’ve never heard of a company making a 100% recycled TPU product.”
He has even conducted an experiment to find the breaking point of the plastic’s recyclability, re-pressing the same plastic into discs 10 times
“They fly the exact same, they feel the exact same. The only thing is a slight discoloration. It was perfectly clear, and now it’s got a little yellowing, but there’s an additive you could use to counteract that,” he said. “This is proof: 100% recycled, 10 times over, and we didn’t find the breaking point quite yet.”
Trash Panda does have a second waste stream for TPU, and it’s not any less labor intensive.
“When I was in my garage, people started sending me discs to recycle,” he said. “And I was like, ‘Well, we should create a program to recycle discs.’ I thought that one in every 500 disc golfers had a broken disc. I think it’s been less than two years, we’ve recycled over 30,000 discs.”
He gets discs that are dented, bent, chewed on by dogs, run over by lawnmowers. There are pallet-sized crates full of battered discs made by the big-name domestic manufacturers and small stacks of discs, as few as three or four, from obscure manufacturers in Sweden or China. They’ll sit on a shelf for now.
“They will get collected as we keep getting more, and we will figure out how to recycle them. That’s my commitment,” he said. “That’s my commitment to it because I’m still young and naive and have hope in a better world.”
Trash Panda disc golf sets are sold in eight REI stores. (Handout)
Trash Panda is a member of 1% for the Planet, donating 1% of revenue to environmental causes. The company is also a certified B Corp, providing rigorous verification of Trash Panda’s sustainability focus, Stedman said. “The external validation was a really important part for us.”
B Corp doesn’t care how a Trash Panda disc performs on the course, though. For that, he looks at how consumers have embraced the products.
Trash Panda has retailers in 44 states and 14 countries listed on its website, and the starter disc set — consisting of a driver, a midrange and a putter in a recycled cardboard box printed with algae ink — was picked up by the REI flagship store in Denver in the fall, with several more REI outlets now carrying them.
WANT TO GIVE IT A FLY?
For the would-be disc golfer or the disc-golf curious Denverite Jesse Stedman recommends the Johnny Roberts Disc Golf Course on W. 59th Ave. in Arvada. “It’s so fun. It’s short, it’s very easy, it’s very casual,” he said of the par-3 course. “It’s a great place to go hang out. It’s a nice little park.”
Type of Story: Explainer
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