MBA Joint Venture Receives Financing

An international financing group with environmental advocacy goals is investing $1.2 million in an MBA Polymers joint venture plastics recycling facility in Guangzhou, China.

Funding from the Environmental Opportunities Facility of the International Finance Corp. (IFC), Washington, will help develop and operate the joint venture plastics recycling facility, which will handle mixed plastics harvested from recycled appliances and electronics.

“Choosing China for its first plastic recycling plant outside the U.S. was a strategic part of MBA’s international expansion,” says Karin Finkelston, IFC’s associate director for China. “The company’s efforts will help create more sustainable manufacturing activities for all connected industries which, without MBA’s technology, would end up producing waste streams that contaminate groundwater and pollute the air.”

MBA Polymers, Richmond, Calif., has developed technology that can recycle highly mixed waste streams of high value plastics, such as those common to discarded consumer durable goods and electronics, on a commercial production scale. Through the process, raw material is converted for reuse into high-value engineering plastics.

China is rapidly becoming a leading consumer of durable goods, electronic equipment, and automobiles, which will provide the raw materials needed at the new plant.  It is also the second-largest and most rapidly growing user of plastics in the world, but it must import more than 50 percent of the plastics it needs. MBA’s plant will provide a needed domestic source of plastics for China.

“MBA Polymers is pleased to have IFC tangibly recognize the significant environmental and economic benefits of our technology,” says Mike Biddle, MBA’s CEO.  “We intend to build additional recycling facilities in countries where IFC is focusing its development efforts, and we look forward to further projects together.

The Environmental Opportunities Facility was established in 2002 to provide flexible financing to innovative ventures that have a strong potential to increase environmental sustainability but that must overcome the uncertainty associated with new markets, new technologies, and new ways of doing business. Key funders of the facility include the governments of Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, and Norway, as well as IFC.

The mission of IFC (www.ifc.org) is to promote sustainable private sector investment in developing countries. From its founding in 1956 through 2004, IFC has committed more than $44 billion of its own funds and arranged $23 billion in syndications for 3,100 companies in 140 developing countries.