WM invests $42M in northeast Pennsylvania

Houston-based WM plans to invest $42 million in a new material recovery facility (MRF) in Plainfield Township, Pennsylvania.

WM says the $42 million investment includes design, construction and equipment for the MRF. The company plans to open its 92,000-square-foot Grand Central Recycling Center on a 22.78-acre parcel of land that will be subdivided from a larger tract adjacent to WM’s Grand Central Landfill and Hauling office in Plainfield Township.

WM says it received the land in Plainfield Township when it merged with USA Waste in 1998. WM has operated the Grand Central Landfill at that location since then.

The company says it submitted a land development and subdivision application to Plainfield Township for the MRF and will appear before the township’s planning commission this month. It expects the approval process to take up to a year.

If all applications and permitting are approved, WM says it anticipates the Grand Central MRF to be operational by the first quarter of 2025. The MRF will receive paper, plastics, metal and glass from residential and commercial customers in eastern Pennsylvania.

WM says the new MRF will feature optical sorters and artificial intelligence coupled with new screening technology, magnets and eddy currents to help with sorting efficiency.

WM Greater Mid-Atlantic Area Director of Recycling Jim VanWoert says the Grand Central Recycling Center will be designed to facilitate tours and include a 4,000-square-foot sustainability education center that will be available to the public for meetings.

“[The Grand Central Recycling Center] will be one of the most technologically advanced material recovery facilities in northeast Pennsylvania, allowing WM to increase recycling capacity, increase the capture rate of the most environmentally significant materials and expand the list of acceptable materials, including more plastics, improve the quality, value and marketability of the finished bales and lastly better manage the inbound contamination or nonrecyclables more efficiently,” WM says in a statement to Recycling Today.  

WM currently operates the former Greenstar recycling facility in Northampton, Pennsylvania. WM says it has outgrown its operations in Northampton and plans to cease those operations when it opens the new Grand Central Recycling Center.

WM says Northampton operations and employees will be moved to the new MRF. The company also plans to hire 30 additional employees for the new MRF.