PROJECT OVERVIEW

Storage Facility Building

Ontario Steel Buildings

When your job is recycling more than a billion pounds of nylon and polyester, you need a big storage facility.

That was the dilemma facing Dale McLellan, the owner of Min-Tech, Inc., an Ontario , Canada , plastics recycler. Since 1996, Min-Tech has been a leading broker and recycler of all grades of plastics and plastic processing equipment.

The company recovers discarded nylon and polyester from three Ontario landfills, which it then processes into new plastics for textile use in mainland China and other countries.

McLellan says the time was right to expand the business with a new building.

“We’re shipping out 400- to 500 thousand pounds of plastic every day, and we store up to five million pounds of it, so we definitely needed more room,” McLellan says.

McLellan began researching options for a new building in June of 2004 – and he found a 60- by 148-foot Allied Steel building that met the company’s needs. He put in his order for the building in October, 2004. The building arrived on time in November.

He says on-time delivery was important to him, and Allied passed the test. Min-Tech had outgrown its existing 15,000 square foot structure and needed more room – and the operation couldn’t afford to miss a beat.

“Allied Steel was price-competitive, for sure, but they got us the building we needed . when we needed it,” McLellan says.

Allied Steel provided the drawings, which McLellan says he appreciated. Once the concrete slab was prepared in early December, a four-person crew got to work. Due to heavy snowstorms and holiday breaks, construction took “about a month,” he says.

He says there was one small problem, the order was missing two pieces of flashing for the gable. But with one call to Allied, the parts were delivered in two days.

Once the building was completed, Min-Tech immediately started moving in the four or five million pounds of plastic to be temporarily stored in the facility. The plastic is usually either baled or stored as recycled pellets, McLellan says.

McLellan says the company has contracts for “landfill recovery” at three different area landfills. Min-Tech will remove 140 million pounds of polyester and more than one billion pounds of nylon from the sites for recycling.

After the plastic textile material is converted back into raw plastics, it begins a long journey from its temporary Allied Steel home to, ultimately, shelves of clothing stores around the world.

Min-Tech loads up to a half-million pounds of plastic every day onto trucks headed for Toronto. From Toronto, the plastic is shipped by rail to Vancouver – where it is loaded onto cargo ships bound for the Orient.

“Then they’ll be converted back into textiles that will end up in shirts and all kinds of other clothing you’ll buy,” McLellan says.

He adds that now, thanks to its new Allied Steel building, his nine-person company is poised for future growth.

“I can’t say enough about how great it was to work with Allied Steel,” McLellan says. “We wouldn’t hesitate to use them in the future if we needed to.”