Industrial shredding equipment manufacturer Vecoplan LLC will invest almost $11 million in High Point, N.C., and add 51 new jobs as it expands and relocates its North American headquarters.
Based in nearby Archdale, N.C., since 2000, the subsidiary of Bad Marienberg, Germany-based Vecoplan AG serves the plastics, wood, paper and waste industries with shredders, grinders, granulators, chippers and conveyors.
Vecoplan LLC has expanded several times in Archdale, most recently in 2019, when a facility was built to make shredder trucks, which handle paper, including whole banker boxes and three-ring binders of documents, as well as plastics such as CDs and DVDs, and textiles and counterfeit products for security and other purposes.
Four years later, Vecoplan has outgrown its current site, which is about 50,000 square feet in Randolph County. The company will continue to operate it while looking at how best to grow into the new space.
Vecoplan will lease all of a recently built 94,160-square-foot building in the neighboring city of High Point. The location is in Guilford County, about 14 miles from the current headquarters, so it will be a convenient commute for any of the company's 90 existing employees whose work transfers there, and it will provide space to bring on 51 new workers.
Vecoplan is growing in all its markets with demand increasing the most for mobile shredders to handle paper documents and old electronics, company officials said.
"At the current trajectory Vecoplan USA is experiencing, final decisions related to the necessary workflow and workload are still to be determined," CEO Frank Boerjan said in a news statement. "The new facility will reflect Vecoplan's global corporate image and will certainly be the operations center for Vecoplan North America."
The new plant should be fully equipped and operating in the first quarter of 2024.
The company will invest nearly $11 million into the facility to help meet the increased demand for mobile shredding trucks, waste collection trucks, and other recycling and sorting equipment and components, according to High Point City Council documents and a news release about the project from N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper.
"Vecoplan is extremely excited to expand our North American headquarters in the Piedmont Triad Region of North Carolina," Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Queen said in the release.
Salaries at the new plant will vary by position with an overall average annual wage of about $85,000, which exceeds Guilford County's overall average annual wage of $57,190. These new jobs will have a potential annual payroll impact of more than $2.7 million for the region, the release says.
Vecoplan will receive performance-based grants of $75,000 from the One North Carolina Fund and $155,366 from the High Point City Council if it meets specified job creation and capital investment benchmarks.
The company indicated it lacks room to expand at its present site, according to Kevin Franklin, president of Randolph County Economic Development Corp.
While it's difficult to lose an employer, the plan keeps the company headquarters and jobs in the region, Franklin told Triad Business Journal.
In addition to its HQ site, Vecoplan LLC has three sales, parts and product trial centers in the U.S. after opening a technical services facility in Eastvale, Calif., in May 2022.
The parent company has about 450 employees at locations in the U.S., Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom.
Founded in 1969, Vecoplan AG started out making waste grinders, industrial chippers and scrap shredders for recycling wood and managing wood waste, then it got into the plastic, paper and waste markets in 1989.
The same basic shredder and grinder designs are used for plastic applications, such as reducing large extruder purgings; processing entire batches of reject molded parts; and shredding bales of film, PET bottles, carpet waste, synthetic textile fiber waste and more.