Greeley to consider incentives for plastic recycling operation

GREELEY — The Greeley City Council will hear, at a date uncertain, about a $1.3 million incentive agreement to lure a Rocky Mountain region plastics recycling company to Greeley.

Called “Project Energy,” the company would establish a pyrolysis plant to convert plastics into energy products, according to a memo from Benjamin Snow, economic health and housing director for the city.

Pyrolysis is the process of converting organic substances to base components using temperatures in excess of 500 degrees in the absence of oxygen. 

Included in the project would be a plastics sorting facility.

The pyrolysis facility would be adjacent to Andersen Sales and Salvage, 1490 E. Eighth St., and would be fueled in part by plastic materials removed from vehicles. Other materials to be processed there would come from household waste that Project Energy would collect from waste haulers in the community. The collection point for that waste, according to Snow’s memo, could be in the Ironwood Business Park.

Snow said in the memo that Project Energy — the actual business entity would be disclosed later — has agreed to:

• -Buy the remaining portion of the Ironwood Business Park, about 12 acres.
• -Develop a 20,000-square-foot municipal waste sorting/transfer station on the site at a cost of about $12 million. It would employ about 25 people.
• -Develop speculative industrial space on the site at a cost of about $7.5 million.
• -Provide household plastic waste to the pyrolysis plant. That plant would cost about $85 million, be 40,000 square feet and employ about 35 people.
• -Donate land it owns in Greeley, about 8.77 acres, for open space, trails and parks. 

The city has agreed, Snow wrote, to use $1.3 million from the existing Western Sugar tax increment financing balance to build a road and utilities at the Ironwood Business Park. He told BizWest that the incentive agreement will come before the City Council in March or perhaps April depending upon revisions to the development agreement.

The city has already been working with a company on a 22,000-square-foot transfer station at 1060 N. 11th Ave. in Greeley. That company, All Recycling North LLC, is a subsidiary of Metro Metals Northwest Inc. of Portland, Oregon. All Recycling has recycling facilities at Englewood, Denver and Brighton. Plans for the development of that transfer station were submitted Feb. 22, 2022, and as of Jan. 13 this year was still in the design phase, according to city documents.

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