New $20M Recycling Plant Breaking Ground in Austin

By Camelia Bulea, Associate Editor

Austin residents will benefit from a new $20 million recycling plant in Northeast Austin, which is set to open in the fall of 2012. The facility, which is being built on a 10-acre site, will process 25 tons of residential and commercial recyclables per hour.

The company that broke ground on the recycling plant is Balcones Resources Inc., the recycling company that a few months ago was awarded a 20-year contract to process 60 percent of Austin’s residential recyclables.

Austin City Council split the contract between Balcones and TDS, which will cover the remaining 40 percent. Both deals will cost about $3.4 million. The recycling program, beginning in October of this year, will service 177,170 residential accounts and 543 commercial accounts. Last year the recycling program collected approximately 55,000 tons of garbage.

In other news, the Austin industrial market closed the second quarter of the current year with a vacancy rate of 13.5 percent, shows a report by Grubb & Ellis Co. According to the report, the net absorption in the second quarter was 208,374 square feet, of which the northern market recorded the largest deals—totaling 166,873 square feet. The sector’s activity was led by deals involving the Texas Department of Transportation, Kodiak Assembly Solutions LLC, Floor King Inc. and Trillium US Inc.

The report also points out that at the end of the second quarter, there was about 663,000 square feet of industrial space under construction, including a 290,000-square-foot distribution facility and Data Foundry Inc.’s 250,000-square-foot data center.