Design study · Water resource recovery · Colorado
We do not treat waste. We recover resources.
A redesign concept for one of Colorado's largest water resource recovery facilities, where the hardest job is explaining what the place actually is to the 300,000 neighbours it serves.
WordPress redesign concept prepared for RFP 26-022. A demonstration, not the live South Platte Renew website.
- Utility website design
- WordPress
- Facility tours
- Bilingual search
- Open data
- Accessibility
South Platte Renew — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A jointly owned regional facility processing 20 million gallons a day has a public-understanding problem more than a navigation problem. Most residents do not know it exists, and those who do think of it as a treatment plant — which undersells a resource recovery operation and makes every conversation about rates, odour, or capital projects harder than it needs to be. Meanwhile teachers, businesses, and staff each need concrete things from the same site.
The approach
The organizing line is a journey: follow every drop from drain to river. That gives residents a way into the science, teachers a structure to teach from, and the facility a frame for its own identity — resource recovery, not waste treatment, stated plainly on the page. One search connects residents, teachers, businesses, and staff to tours, events, service-map routing, PARC projects, public documents, and the podcast, over 43 seeded records spanning pages, PDFs, events, podcast episodes, and routing. Tours are treated as a primary conversion rather than a buried form, because a facility tour is the single most effective thing this organization can do to explain itself. Spanish runs alongside.
The result
Thirteen routes covering the facility, resource recovery, PARC, tours and education, events, forms, and search, with a Spanish surface and an accessibility route, built from the facility's own public imagery.
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