3R’s U.S. facility plans to offer a domestic processing option for portions of the e-scrap stream that are increasingly difficult to export. | Photo courtesy Basel Action Network
3R Technology California is getting ready to open up shop at its first U.S. location in the Southern California city of Riverbank. The company processes e-plastics into clean, separated flake to help keep e-plastics in the U.S.
CEO Yulin Wang operates a smaller facility in Manchester, England, called 3R Technology UK, as well as Hermion, a Netherlands-based company that creates and designs plastics recycling systems.
The new California facility is about 80,000 square feet and will have a processing capacity of 20,000 metric tons per year, according to the company. It will accept scrap plastic from electronics, small domestic appliances and auto-related industries, in shredded or baled form as well as intact used electronics and small appliances. 3R can separate out metals before flaking and washing ABS, PP, PE, general purpose PS, high-impact PS, PMMA, polycarbonate-ABS and nylon.
Two-thirds of the plant installation is completed, and the company expects to start testing that equipment while the final components are installed, marketing manager Francisco Cabrera Gomez told E-Scrap News. The company expects to start up in the first quarter of this year.
With the most recent Basel Convention restrictions, the company saw an opportunity to build a business similar to its operations in England but bigger, Cabrera said. He said the state’s particularly stringent permitting process was perhaps the biggest obstacle.
But Riverbank is invested in having the company locate there, so the city has helped the company navigate the labyrinthine process, he said. Once the California plant is up and running, the company hopes to expand into other states, Cabrera added, and is already surveying potential suppliers of used electronics to help determine locations.
Another challenge has been to design the recycling process to suit electronics used in the U.S., which can differ from those in the U.K., he said.
Although the goal is to keep e-plastics domestic, the bagged flake can be exported in compliance with the Basel Convention. It’s meant to be sold back to extruders for creating recycled engineered resin in the same industries.
The new facility is being built on a former ammunition manufacturing site that is part of the U.S. Army base realignment and closure process, or BRAC. The owner of the site is Aemetis, a biofuels company.
3R currently has about 10 employees, Cabrera said, and ultimately plans to have about 15.