The federal government is offering IRG Recycling group a $182.6 million loan for a recycling facility on East Lake Road in Erie, potentially accelerating the plant's development.

This loan will help cover 60 percent of the funding needed to bring this recycling plant to the area which IRG Recycling leaders said will create jobs and make Erie a more environmentally friendly city.


Mitch Hecht, the Founder and CEO of IRG Recycling  explained, "This will be the first of its kind in the country. It will be one of the largest plants and it will really put Erie on the map for being a leader nationally in sustainability and how to handle the plastics solution and plastics waste problem."


Right now, many plastics aren't recycled, and those that are have to be sorted by homeowners and businesses. The plant could change that.
As Hecht explained "We want everything in a recycling bin and then leave it to us to sort it for best and highest use."


They hope to continue to move forward with plans to have this 26-acre space up and running by mid-2026.
Environmentalists have concerns about plastic pollution and and about byproducts created during the recycling process. Erie News Now brought those questions to Hecht.

"This is a very clean manufacturing process, it's not advanced chemical recycling which people are worried about. There are no emissions here, the material is sorted with infrared machinery, which is essentially light rays, so there's no heavy emissions", said Hecht.


He said they plan to use a mechanical recycling process for their plant. As Hecht said, "We think mechanical is the way to go, it has a much lower carbon foot print we don't use pyrolysis, we don't use heat to change the chemistry and if you use heat to change the chemistry there could be environmental issues related to that. So we are not fans of that method of recycling. I think everybody supports mechanical recycling, it tends to be the lowest cost, the simplest way to do it and it has the lowest carbon foot print."


Hecht said there should be no excess noise or increase of carbon dioxide emissions, "There's no increase in CO2, in fact with some of the material we take it to replace coal in steel production and because it's a hydrocarbon replacing a pure carbon we are actually dramatically replacing CO2 emissions, so it's a net reduction in greenhouse gases."


Hecht said this plant will provide more jobs in clean tech and manufacturing as well as the 18-24 month construction process as well.