Texas Recycling moves into new facility

Dallas-based Texas Recycling Inc. has announced the completion of its move into a new 180,000-square-foot plant and office facility. According to Joel Litman, a co-owner of Texas Recycling, the move  allows the paper recycling company to expand its operations to handle additional commodities, including plastics and metals.

The family-owned recycling firm, which was founded in 1992 as Texas Recycling/Surplus, has moved into part of a building that formerly served as an assembly plant for Ford Motor Co. from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The late Stan Litman founded Texas Recycling, which is led currently by his sons, Joel and Craig. Joel says his daughter, Hillary, who has been working for Texas Recycling for five years, represents the third generation of the family to lead the company.

“We had been looking for a newer place for three years when the building came on the market early last year,” Joel says of the new location.

He says the leased facility has a number of excellent features, including an active rail siding inside the building, which was on the company’s wish list.

“I think we have always been focused on service. However, now we can push this theme, especially with the metals. Lots of companies are going the MRF (material recovery facility) route with low value materials. However, our niche has always been higher service with higher quality material.”

He says the new location provides a “boutique” operation that customers want.

Action Shred of Texas, a National Association for Information Destruction (NAID) certified document destruction subsidiary, also operates from the new location.

Texas Recycling initially focused on paper and pulp substitutes, Joel says, before expanding 10 years ago into some forms of plastics and scrap metals.

The new facility helped prompt the slight name change, says Joel . “With our new home and our ramped-up growth into metals and plastics, the new name more accurately reflects our focus,” he comments.

Regarding the new facility, Craig Litman comments, “As we’ve grown over the years, we realized we would run out of space at our original home and began the search for a new location three years ago. At times we were working out of five or six buildings at once. The space for our new plant provides room for expansion, along with flexibility for handling a wider variety of scrap materials.”

Joel says the building's high ceilings allow the company to load rail cars inside.

Among the features of the new plant are an indoor rail siding, a 70-ton truck scale, ceilings high enough to allow roll-off and compactor trucks to tip their loads and a multistation sorting line. The facility also includes a retail purchasing center for cardboard and metals.

Equipment operating at the new plant includes a new Harris Centurion two-ram baler; two American Baler horizontal balers; an Ameri-Shred paper shredder; and a roll shear and a heavy-duty shredder from Recycling Equipment Inc. (REI). RRT Design & Construction, Melville, New York, assisted with the equipment relocation and the setup of the new facility.