DP Electronic Recycling Inc. plans to move from its current location in Elkhorn to a new, 150,000-square-foot, $12.5 million headquarters facility that it will build in the Whitewater University Technology Park in Whitewater.
The company will move at least 100 jobs to the facility, which it will use to process 52 million pounds of hazardous cathode ray tubes (CRT), annually.
Construction is expected to begin this spring and be complete in the spring of 2017.
The six-year-old company provides data destruction, asset management and e-waste recycling services for Wisconsin businesses and consumers. It recycles anything that plugs into a wall or requires a battery.
This new facility will now allow DP to process CRT and recycle it into environmentally safe consumer products, such as ceramic tiles.
The EPA bans CRT, commonly found in televisions and computer monitors, from landfills. As a result, over 1 billion pounds of the world’s CRT tubes are currently in storage.
“This new state of the art facility will help to reduce a large waste stream that currently is not being addressed,” Dale Helgeson, president and CEO, said.
Helgeson said he chose the City of Whitewater because it is a small college community with a need for job opportunities, especially for UW-Whitewater students.
“We want to use UW-Whitewater’s resources to become an integral part of the community,” Helgeson said.
Whitewater pushed to bring DP to the city and especially supported the company’s DNR approval process, Helgeson said.
“We have been very supportive of the company from the start,” Patrick Cannon, executive director of the city’s Community Development Authority said. “With that many jobs created, we expect to see new residents move in and there is also a benefit to other businesses.”
DP is one of several other recycling companies who have introduced similar CRT processing services, including Com-2 Recycling, based in Illinois.
