International Recycling Group, a New York City-based startup, plans to announce this week a $100 million investment to build what it describes as the world’s largest plastics recycling facility in Erie.
The project, supported by a combined $9 million investment from Erie Insurance and the Erie-based Plastek Group, would represent one of the largest-ever outside investments in Erie, said James Grunke, CEO of the Erie Regional Chamber and Growth Partnership.
Mitch Hecht, founder and chairman of IRG, expects the company will create 50 jobs to start and more as it expands. He also predicts there could be a magnet effect as other companies are drawn to locate nearby.
But in the view of both the company’s founder and a plastics researcher at Penn State Behrend, the Erie facility could also introduce a fundamental change in plastics recycling.
In most cases, the economics of recycling plastics don’t work, said Gamini Mendis, a post-doctoral plastics researcher at Penn State Behrend.
Mendis, who has worked with IRG to test its ideas, said the problem is there is a viable market for only two of the seven main types of plastic.
Aside from plastic water, pop and milk containers, most other plastics, including supermarket meat containers, plastic films and grocery bags, end up in landfills at a disposal cost of more than $50 per ton, Mendis said.
The difficulty and expense of separating the good from the bad explain why plastics recycling has slowed to a crawl in the United States.