Taylor Recycling is going global. Company founder and Chairman Jim Taylor welcomed a delegation from the Bahamas to the company's headquarters yesterday.
MONTGOMERY, N.Y. − Taylor Recycling is going global.
Company founder and Chairman Jim Taylor welcomed a delegation from the Bahamas to the company's headquarters yesterday.
They came to talk trash.
"The challenge for us, is how do we dispose of it," said Ron Pinder, a parliamentary secretary for the country's Ministry of Health & Environment.
The island nation's vibrant tourism and second-home industries have spawned a similarly robust trash problem. The country has been battling underground fires at a massive landfill on the island of New Providence, while also contending with acres of building debris left by this fall's hurricanes.
That's where Taylor comes in.
The company turns waste materials from construction and demolition sites -- everything from wood and metal to drywall and stone -- into new, useable products like mulch, aggregate and a soil substitute used as daily cover at landfills.
Taylor is proposing a two-step joint venture with SABL Ltd., an engineering and development firm based in the Bahamas with a secondary office in Des Moines, Iowa, where Taylor recently began operating its second C&D recycling plant.
The first phase of Taylor's proposal would involve setting up a recycling plant to clean up the existing problems. The second phase would be the development of a biomass-to-fuel operation, so that the country's garbage could be converted into electricity, which could then be sold to the national utility company.
Taylor has proposed adding a similar biomass plant to its C&D plant on Neelytown Road in Montgomery.
"It's like McDonalds. They're all the same, pretty much," Taylor said. "They're modular, so that we can build them and add onto them as the volume increases, as the need increases."
The Bahamas would be a prime candidate for a biomass process because of the country's limited space and its sensitive environment, Taylor said.
The technology hasn't yet been used commercially, but it has generated tremendous interest here and abroad. In the past few months, Taylor has hosted visitors from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Italy, Greece, Germany, Kosovo and Albania.
And the chairman said his schedule is getting busier by the day.
"This is going to catch on so fast," said Taylor, "it's profound."
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
