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Martin Marietta, headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, opened its third asphalt plant in the Denver Metro Area 8.6 miles from Denver International Airport.
Martin Marietta Invests in Aerotropolis Asphalt Plant Located 25 miles from downtown, Denver International Airport (DIA) has long been subject to complaints that it’s too far from the city. A quarter of a century after its construction, it seems the city is coming to the airport. In 2016, the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) funded the Colorado Aerotropolis Visioning Study to identify infrastructure needed to support economic development around DIA. According to the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), which administered the study, an aerotropolis is “an urban plan in which the layout, infrastructure, and economy are centered on and around an airport.” The plan is to populate the 21,000 mostly vacant acres of Aerotropolis’ land with 10
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million square feet of retail space, 30 million square feet of office space, and 40 million square feet of industrial and commercial space, as well as numerous residential developments, according to the Denver Post. A recent Metrostudy housing market analysis estimates that nearly 30 percent of the 220,000 available lots left to build on around Denver are located in the E-470/I-70/DIA corridor, adding an average of 544 new homes to the area each year. Aerotropolis will also be home to at least one asphalt plant. Martin Marietta, headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, opened its third asphalt plant in the Denver Metro Area 8.6 miles from DIA and right in the midst of Aerotropolis itself.
“We’ve been running our other two plants in the Denver metro area at maximum capacity for five or six years,” said Martin Marietta General Manager Trevor Norton. “We’d been wanting to add another plant for a while now.” One of the existing plants was producing around one million tons of asphalt per year, and the other, nearly 700,000. “And we still had days where we needed more,” added Area Production Manager Pat Hartshorn. The company purchased the property for their third plant in February 2018. The 500 tph Gencor plant is capable of producing up to 800,000 tons per year, in addition to better-serving jobs east of Denver. The company’s other plants in the Denver metro area include one on the west side of the city along I-70 and one plant right off I-25 and
