A year ago this month, Tosca Ltd.'s former manager of plastic recovery predicted the Green Bay, Wis., company's high density polyethylene recycling business would get worse before it got any better. After seeing recycling sales drop from year to year, the company has announced it has sold the business to Plastic Recovery Services Inc. of North Prairie, Wis. Tosca cited an unfavorable location and declining profit as reasons for the sale.
Tosca Vice President John Frey refused to disclose the selling price, but said the deal should be final before the end of April. He added that the recycling business should be operational again under PRS by late May.
"We're landlocked where we are to get product in," Frey said in a telephone interview. "We just missed it on that."
Tosca's recycling sales dropped from $1 million in 1998 to $750,000 in 1999. Frey said the company expects sales to drop another 25 percent this year.
Right now the firm has no plans to re-enter the recycling business.
"It depends on if you can make money at it," Frey said. "You can sell all the good features about being proactive environmentally. If it doesn't make sense economically, it doesn't seem people want to do it."
Frey said the seven or so employees will be shifted to other duties within the company's main business of servicing returnable industrial food and beverage containers.
Several calls to Plastic Recovery Services, just outside Milwaukee, were not returned.
The Tosca sale follows the recent shutdown of another HDPE recycler, Premier Plastics Recyclers LLC of Mayville, Wis.