WINDSOR, ONTARIO — Mohit Nayar isn't quite a weather expert yet, but he is paying a bit closer attention to it these days.
“I don't like clouds,” he said, laughing.
Green Processing Co. Inc., the company Nayar co-founded with two high school friends, recently installed solar panels to help power the company's two facilities in Windsor. Nayar, who handles accounting for the company, said the payback for the projects is six to seven years, depending on how many sunny days they see.
The company paid $650,000 to install the solar panels on a 16,000-square-foot facility earlier this year and just recently finished completing a solar panel grid at its 56,000-square-foot headquarters and main office. The second project cost $1.1 million.
“We hold ourselves to a little higher standard,” said company co-founder Jeremy Berger about why they expended the capital for the project. “Yes, we save power and money, but we should be a leader in this space, too.”
The larger of the two projects includes 720 solar panels, Nayar said, and will produce enough electricity to power the entire facility minus the machinery. That figure amounts to 30 percent of the facility's monthly electrical usage. The company sells the electricity it produces with the panels back into the grid.
“It just goes with our whole green philosophy,” Nayar said.
While the payoff date is six years away, the panels are expected to last 20 years, he said. The solar panels were installed by OYA Solar, also based in Windsor. With the quick payback time, the business decision was very easy to make, the two said.
Berger said the company processes 3.5 to 4 million pounds of plastic a month, mostly from Tier 1 and Tier 2 automotive suppliers. In addition to the Windsor facilities, they have facilities in Cleveland and Laredo, Texas.
Along with collecting and processing plastic for recycling, the company also refurbishes and sells containers. They have the containers manufactured with the recycled plastic they process.
Started with three friends as essentially a plastic brokering firm in 2008, the company has grown to 75 employees and they will process over 40 million pounds of plastic this year, Berger said.
The company's recycling division handles all post-industrial plastics, including high density polyethylene, polypropylene and high molecular weight plastic automotive dunnage, as well as automotive plastics such as PP, thermoplastic olefins, nylon, ABS, PC/ABS, polycarbonate and acrylic.
