Two big-name investors will help finance San Antonio’s newest Texas-sized recycling facility, which entered a 15-year municipal recycling contract with the City of San Antonio on Thursday, according to a press release.
Lobbying group the American Beverage Association (ABA) and capital market company Closed Loop Partners will invest a $3 million loan toward Balcones Recycling’s new San Antonio-based “materials recovery facility,” which sorts and removes recyclables from waste. The new facility will create approximately 70 new full-time jobs in San Antonio to operate the facility, according to a press release issued earlier this summer by Balcones Recycling, the recycling division of Circular Services, a Closed Loop Partners company.
The investment is part of the ABA’s “Every Bottle Back” initiative, which aims to improve the sustainability of beverage containers and enhance global recycling efforts, the ABA stated in its own press release issued Thursday.
“Closed Loop Partners is proud to be a longstanding partner of the American Beverage Association, working collaboratively to strengthen recycling infrastructure and advance a circular economy for materials in the U.S.,” said Jennifer Louie, managing director and head of the Closed Loop Infrastructure Group at Closed Loop Partners. “We are excited to support the development of Balcones’ facility in San Antonio alongside a diverse group of stakeholders and financing partners.”
The loan will go toward the installation of new equipment to “improve the processing and recycling of materials,” and “add recycling capacity at the facility,” the ABA stated in its press release. The new 200,000-square-foot facility broke ground in May 2023 and opened earlier this summer.
“This state-of-the-art facility is a critical step toward improving San Antonio’s recycling infrastructure,” said Carol McGarah, executive director of the Texas Beverage Association. “We are proud to be a part of this project and build on Every Bottle Back’s work in Texas to ensure recyclables, like our bottles and cans, are remade into new materials as intended.”
With new sorting technology, the facility aims to significantly improve the recycling rate of a range of materials including polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles, which will be returned to supply chains and can be used for new bottles, helping keep these materials in circulation, the release stated. The facility is expected to yield nearly 1 million tons of recyclables over the next decade, including nearly 60,000 tons of PET plastic and more than 20,000 tons of aluminum, both of which are used to make recyclable cans and bottles.
This investment is one of 65 initial projects funded through Every Bottle Back, according to the release. To date, the beverage industry has pledged $39.1 million in nationwide funding. These investments are expected to produce nearly 915 million pounds of recycled PET and over 87 million pounds of recycled aluminum over the next decade.
