Itec Environmental Group, Inc. announced that it received approval for a $2 million low-interest loan from the California Integrated Waste Management Board through the Recycle Market Development Zone Loan Program. The loan was approved at the August 17 meeting of the CIWMB.
"We worked with the CIWMB for some time on this project. We are extremely pleased with the Board's approval of the loan and consider the fact that this loan was approved after a prior $256,000 research grant from the CIWMB to develop the ECO2 Environmental System to be an exciting development. We believe this loan will enable Itec to build the first of what we hope to be many plants in the USA," stated Gary De Laurentiis, president of Itec Environmental Group.
"Over the past 18 months we have been testing our Eco2 System technology which uses a environmental friendly co-solvent and CO2 to clean post-consumer plastics, instead of water, to remove dirt, labels, glue and contaminates from the containers from plastics. We've been focusing on recovering very high quality food grade flake from recyclable plastic containers that existing systems either avoid or must ship overseas. The test results proved that this state of the art Eco2 System will produce a finished, odor free product for 30% less than other systems. The fact that the Eco2 System uses absolutely no water, and discharges nothing into the environment, is of great significance when one considers that this is an industry that exists to reduce damage to the environment, not simply substitute one source of pollution with another," added De Laurentiis.
The company expects to start ordering equipment for the plant by the middle of this month, with installation of the equipment taking approximately four months. At full capacity, the company believes the plant will produce approximately 6,000 pounds per hour of post-consumer PET beverage containers and HDPE used oil containers and employ approximately 48 production personnel.