Recycler Drops Plans to Build Business Park
The new owners of Gold Coast Recycling Inc. in Ventura have abandoned of plans for a proposed $100-million “environmental business park.”
Instead, Gold Coast will expand its current plant on Colt Street, according to Ralph, Jim and Myron Harrison, part owners of Harrison Industries, which dominates the waste hauling business in western Ventura County.
It wouldn’t be sound business to build and equip a large new facility, said Ralph Harrison, president of Gold Coast. The Harrison interests bought Gold Coast in July.
Ralph Harrison said one of the problems in the previous owner’s ambitious plans would have involved selling the company’s existing facility in a weak real estate market.
He added that the amount of renewable waste being generated in Ventura County doesn’t justify the scale of the plant that was proposed for a 19.5-acre parcel near the Ventura Auto Center in east Ventura.
The more modest expansion will cost $2.4 million and will more than double the present facility. It will include a new 30,000-square-foot building adjoining the company’s existing 24,000-square-foot building.
Gold Coast will purchase an additional 4.1 acres next to its present property, bringing the total to 6.7 acres.
“The cost of expanding our present facility will be less than half the cost of implementing our original plans,” said Chris Webb, Gold Coast’s marketing director.
Gold Coast said it hopes to start construction of its new facility next April. The expansion is expected to be completed by August, 1996.
The company, which opened in 1989, has 80 employees. It was formed to work with the city of Ventura’s curbside recycling program but now also serves Fillmore, Ojai, Camarillo, Newbury Park, parts of unincorporated Ventura County and Carpinteria in Santa Barbara County.
Gold Coast now takes in up to 440 tons of material a day. After the expansion, the volume is expected to rise to about 1,200 tons daily. A large commodities broker sells the recyclables on the international market.
