By Michael Lauzon
CORRESPONDENT
Published: September 17, 2014 12:56 pm ET
Updated: September 17, 2014 12:59 pm ET
Image By: ACI Plastics Inc.
ACI Plastics Inc.'s headquarters facility in Flint, Mich.
Reprocessor and recycler ACI Plastics Inc. is expanding in South Carolina.
The firm is investing about $4.1 million to start up a recycling facility in Westminster, S.C., that will replace its original operation in the state in Anderson.
ACI opened the Anderson recycling plant about four years ago and the operation “positioned us for a fair amount of growth,” explained ACI Chief Operating Officer Bill McCaffrey in a telephone interview.
“We’re setting up a more permanent facility,” McCaffrey stated. “We need a bigger space.”
ACI is remodeling the Westminster plant, an 88,000-square-foot building acquired by the company. Its existing Anderson unit with 50,000 square feet of space will be phased out as ACI completes the Westminster renovation next spring. Its Westminster operation will be based in a former textile warehouse located about 20 minutes away from Anderson. The new location will employ 25.
Westminster will eventually boost ACI’s capacity for paint removal of post-industrial scrap and capabilities for auto instrument panel recycling.
ACI is known for its reprocessing of auto scrap but it has been making inroads into medical components recycling. It is in startup phases for a medical recycling operation in Columbus, Neb., that will build on early medical recycling efforts at its Tempe, Ariz., facility.
“The purchase of this building [in Westminster] is key to our strategic growth in the South,” noted ACI President Scott Melton in a Sept. 15 news release. “Within the next ten years, we see our operation in South Carolina being as large as our operation in Michigan, where we operate in 225,000 square feet with 85 employees.”
ACI’s headquarters plant is in Flint, Mich. That factory is engaged in all of ACI’s recycling technologies, including size reduction, multi-layer plastic separation using electrostatic and optical methods, paint removal, compounding, blending and logistics. Westminster will start with size reduction, toll grinding, product destruction, dismantling, warehousing and logistics and will add paint removal and instrument panel recycling within the next few years.
ACI recycles about 50 million pounds of engineering plastics annually, most of which is reprocessed by the firm. Its major resins are ABS, nylon, polycarbonate, polyolefins and PVC. It has been in business for 28 years. | 
