Polypropylene recycler PureCycle Technologies Inc. said July 29 it will invest $440 million in a manufacturing facility in Augusta, Ga.
The Orlando, Fla.-based company, which uses solvents to recycle PP materials, said the investment will fund three production lines, each with a capacity to reprocess 130 million per year.
The announcement did not provide details on when the facility would come on line, but the company said it wants to reach 1 billion pounds of production capacity by 2025.
Company officials told the Augusta Chronicle newspaper that they intend to begin construction early next year.
It's the company's second manufacturing site, after a much smaller facility in Ironton, Ohio. The Georgia plant is the company's first planned "cluster" manufacturing site.
PureCycle said it could construct up to five production lines at the site. The $440 million investment will create about 80 jobs, it said.
The firm, which uses technology licensed from Procter & Gamble Co., was criticized in a short-seller stock report in May from Hindenburg Research, which questioned its technology and business plans.
PureCycle rejected the criticism and said it was pushing ahead with plans to open a commercial scale facility in Ironton by late 2022.
Executives said at the time that cluster manufacturing sites would start to come on stream in 2023 and 2024.
The company in May said lost $30 million in its first quarter as a public company this year, after it started trading on the Nasdaq exchange. But it said it had $570 million in cash reserves.