Upstate Shredding to build heavy media plant in New York

Upstate Shredding – Weitsman Recycling, Owego, New York, has announced plans to build a heavy media plant at its Owego facility. The company says it initially looked at locating the media plant in western Pennsylvania but opted to build it at its shredder facility in Owego.

Adam Weitsman, CEO of Upstate Shredding – Weitsman Recycling, says that while the company was strongly considering building the $15 million state-of-the-art heavy media plant in western Pennsylvania “as the state and local municipalities rolled out the red carpet to us to have the project located there,” recent economic bad news in the Southern Tier region of New York resulted in Upstate Shredding deciding to locate the plant in Owego.

“We could not in good faith create jobs outside of the region instead of building the facility right here and employing local Southern Tier people that need the help the most,” Weitsman says.

According to several local news reports, the “economic bad news” Weitsman refers to includes New York Gov. Cuomo’s decision to ban fracking in the state as well as the decision not to site a casino in the region.

Weitsman adds that the company expects to have the new plant operational by the middle of 2015. It will be housed in a new 20,000-square-foot building.

According to the Central New York Business Journal, the company will start the project with no tax breaks or government incentives and will use local contractors for all of the construction.

The heavy media plant will further process zorba, a shredded mix of nonferrous metals consisting primarily of aluminum generated by an eddy current separator or other segregation techniques, to separate the aluminum from other materials.