The path to processing 1 billion pounds of plastic film in the United States is starting in Minnesota for Cape Town, South Africa-based Myplas.
The post-consumer polypropylene/polyethylene recycler will open up a $24 million facility in Rogers this summer in the former Archway Marketing Services Inc. campus. The facility is expected to be able to recycle 90 million pounds of flexible plastic film per year and will create 250 new jobs in the state.
Myplas CEO Andrew Pieterse said the company looked at multiple Midwest states but settled on Minnesota primarily because of the opportunity to work with MBOLD — a coalition of food and agricultural companies in Minnesota addressing global challenges facing the food and agriculture sectors.
Together, Target Corp., Schwan’s, Ecolab Inc., General Mills Inc., and Charter Next Generation are the company’s most prominent investors, contributing $9.2 million to the project.
“[In the Midwest], there is very little capacity to process what we're going to process, which is film,” Pieterse said. According to the company’s website, only 5% of the more than 10 billion pounds of flexible films used yearly are recycled. Myplas’s goal is to change that by creating a circular economy.
Pieterse said Myplas targeted the Midwest because the companies doing this type of recycling work in the region are scarce, and often the plastic needs to be shipped to the coasts, increasing the carbon footprint. Myplas will process the plastic film and then give it to companies like General Mills or Target to reuse.
