At Thursday’s Lawrence County Port Authority meeting, the board approved a motion for a bond to raise money for equipment for PureCycle Technologies.

The Lawrence County Port Authority approved allowing a bond of up to $250 million for the company.

Bill Dingus, a member of the port authority, explained that the Lawrence County Port Authority is not the agency responsible for the money, rather that is the Scioto County Port Authority that is issuing the bond.

That is because the PureCycle plant was originally going to be placed in Scioto County but, instead, the plant was built in Haverhill, at the old Dow Chemical site. The Lawrence County Port Authority still has to sign off on the bond agreement.

PureCycle will recycle industrial polypropylene scraps in a process licensed from The Procter & Gamble Company. The facility will convert dirty feedstock into virgin-like polypropylene, without any color or contaminants, for use in a variety of products.

Dingus said the company has built a prototype machine, called a feed stock unit, that has successfully demonstrated the process will work and now want to go ahead and build a full-sized commercial unit to recycle plastic.

“So, the bond is to build the commercial unit,” he explained. “It will be funded through Piper Jefferies and the bonding counsel is Frost Brown, from Cincinnati.”

The bond itself is issued through the State of Ohio and it will take awhile before the money is distributed and work begins on building the equipment.

“It takes a long time to get this in process,” Dingus said. “The commercial construction is probably a 23-month build out until they actually start operations. But the beauty is that there will be a total of 75 good jobs.”