Ensley Corp. has acquired Southeast Industries, a division of Zarn Inc., in a move that marks Ensley's entry into the recycled plastics processing and compounding business.
Southeast Industries in Reidsville, N.C., washes, grinds and pelletizes post-consumer and post-industrial high density polyethylene and high-molecular-weight HDPE. It also has compounding capability, said President Dwight Ensley.
Neither Ensley nor Zarn would disclose the terms of the deal, which closed Aug. 22.
Zarn sold the operations to concentrate on its core business of blow molding municipal waste containers, said Steve Andrews, Zarn's vice president of finance and treasurer. The firm sold an Atlanta molding operation last year, and its Reidsville headquarters is now the firm's sole facility.
The Southeast Industries plant supplied Zarn with recycled feedstock for its containers and will continue to do so under Ensley's operation.
``In this particular deal, we have assured ourselves a source of recycled content for our containers, which is important to us,'' Andrews said.
North Canton, Ohio-based Ensley sold its Zanesville, Ohio, glass processing plant to Strategic Materials Inc. in March to concentrate on its plastics brokerage business and to expand the processing and manufacturing end.
During the next year, Ensley plans to increase production at the plant, which has the capacity to process 18 million pounds annually. The expansion probably will include handling other resins in addition to toll processing, or charging a fee to process industrial scrap for companies to put back into their own manufacturing process, Ensley said.
Coupled with the firm's existing brokerage operations, Ensley now handles 25 million to 30 million pounds of material annually.
Ensley plans to acquire more plastic compounding and recycling businesses in the next several years to be a producer of both recycled and virgin compounded resin.
Southeast Industries started as a nylon recycling plant in 1954 and was the financial parent of Zarn, founded as a molding firm in 1960.
Southeastern Industries merged into Zarn in 1987.
