Relevant news






Source: Recycling Today
Erie Insurance is investing in the new IRG plant through its Opportunity Zone Fund based on the company meeting pre-development progress milestones, IRG reports. Separately, Plastek has purchased an equity stake in IRG’s parent company, GreenSteel LLC.
IRG says its facility in Erie will be a mega-sized, all plastics “SuperPRF” (plastics recovery facility), and the Erie Insurance Opportunity Zone investment will support plant development, including engineering design, site selection and contract work. IRG has designed a concept for a mega-scale plant that uses smart machines to separate and sort residential, commercial and industrial plastics from homes and businesses; processing the entire universe of resin types and forms, and dramatically reducing the amount of material that enters landfill.
The company reports that because recycling currently relies mostly on hand sorting and delivering waste plastics to the bag or bin, the plastics are too often combined with other types of non-recyclable material, which can cause problems for waste haulers and impede municipal efforts to recover more reusable plastics.
IRG says it believes the future of post-use plastics collection and sortation will involve large-scale facilities that have a sustainable non-landfill solution for the non-marketable material. Plastics processors will need to be able to handle all plastics, not just containers so that more plastic is diverted from the trash and driven to recycling. IRG says its non-marketable material will be repurposed into its proprietary iron-reducing agent for use in steel manufacturing.
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Erie Insurance and Plastek to realize our vision of super-large-scale plastics processing facilities. Its location makes it a critical link between the Atlantic coast and Midwest markets. These investments allow us to tap into that potential and bring back manufacturing jobs within the new green-tech industrial economy.
Mitch Hecht, Founder and Chairman, IRG
Plans for its first sorting facility will involve an investment of about $100 million and is expected to start operations in 2022. The facility will provide about 50 manufacturing jobs with future expansion plans for the site.
When completed, IRG says it wants the plant to be the largest and “most technologically sophisticated” plastics recycling plant, automatically sorting more than 275,000 tons of mixed waste plastic material per year.