Republic bets on recycling’s future with new plant

You might not recycle now, but Republic Services is betting you will in the future.

The Phoenix-based company broke ground Thursday on a massive 110,000-square-foot, $34 million expansion of its North Las Vegas recycling facility, one expected to handle three times the number of recyclables passed through its existing trash-handling center.

Once complete, company officials said the Southern Nevada Recycling Complex at Cheyenne Avenue and Commerce Street will be the largest residential recycling center in the nation, a facility capable of processing up to 70 tons of cardboard, glass, plastic and recyclable metal per hour.

So where’s all that trash going to come from? Clark County, mostly, and maybe the city of Las Vegas.

Republic already holds exclusive “single-stream” recycling contracts in the cities of North Las Vegas and Henderson, where 165,000 household customers can toss plastic, glass and paper recyclables into a single 96-gallon black bin, as opposed to hand-sorting that trash into smaller red, white and blue curbside crates.

The company inked a contract to expand those services into unincorporated parts of the county in November 2013 and is in talks to complete a similar deal with Las Vegas within the next few months.

Bringing both municipalities on board with the program could mean a 400 percent to 500 percent uptick in daily recyclables, one Republic hopes to be ready for this time next year.

“What we see when we implement the program is that the participation rate in a neighborhood goes from about 10 or 15 percent of residents to about 90 percent of residents,” company Vice President of Government Affairs Bob Coyle said.

“In order to be able to handle that, we need to build this new facility, because our existing facility is at 100 percent capacity.”

Republic’s planned expansion will mean the addition of 20 permanent jobs and thousands of dollars in annual property tax revenue for cash-strapped North Las Vegas.

The company already employs 160 workers at its adjacent 88,000-square-foot Cheyenne Avenue recycling plant.

Advances in recycling technology — including five optic trash sorters to be installed during the plant’s expansion — means only one-eighth of those workers will be needed at the company’s new facility, though Coyle said projects still in the company’s pipeline will help create plenty more Southern Nevada jobs in the near future.

“Within the next two years we plan on building a natural gas fueling station for the (transfer station) trucks out in Henderson,” he said. “For every truck we convert from diesel to natural gas, that’s the equivalent of taking 300 cars off the street. … That has been a focus of ours moving forward with the (recycling) program.”

Coyle estimates 60 percent of Republic’s North Las Vegas workforce lives in the city, where the company has a weekly payroll of a little over $1 million.

Mayor John Lee, the keynote speaker at Thursday’s groundbreaking, thanked company executives for keeping those dollars in the community.

Lee hailed the publicly traded company’s expansion as a sign that the recession-ravaged city had finally “turned a corner.”

“There are a lot of rich people in this room and a lot of people who are going to make money because of this wonderful company we have here,” the first-term mayor said. “This just goes to show you that Wall Street money has come back to North Las Vegas. … To North Las Vegas, this is a big thing.”

Republic Services hopes to wrap up work on its expanded recycling plant in October 2015.

Company representatives have said the opening of the nation’s largest residential recycling plant could help cut volume by 25 percent at the nation’s largest landfill, just eight miles north near Apex industrial park.

They don’t expect the plant expansion, located in an industrial area near Sedway Middle School, will create any new noise or congestion problems for area residents or schools, even after it grows to handle other municipalities. Recycling trucks already routed to the plant will not have to change their existing daily routes.

Contact James DeHaven at jdehaven@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3839. Find him on Twitter: @JamesDeHaven.