New Loans to Help Recycler Expand

For most, polyethylene means little except for perhaps a game-winning Scrabble word. But for Martyn Keats, the high-density material is his bread and butter.

Keats, owner of the Moorpark-based Marplast plastic recycling and manufacturing facility, relies on discarded heaps of the five-syllable super-material to make everything from toy rockets to surgical tubing to even headrests for cadavers.

“Basically, we can make anything that’s hollow,” Keats said.

And, according to him, business just keeps getting better.

Marplast, which employs 30 people at its 10,000-square-foot facility off New Los Angeles Avenue, received a new low-interest $334,000 loan this week from the Ventura County Recycling Market Development Zone as well as an $875,000 federally backed loan to fund an expansion of his privately held recycling business.

Combined with an estimated $220,000 of his own money, Keats plans to use the $1.4 million to purchase a second 10,000-square-foot building and several new molding machines.

With the expansion, Keats said he expects to more than double his company’s recycling and production capacity, while taking on another 10 full-time employees.

“When people recycle at the curb, they don’t realize it, but they are creating jobs and supplying raw materials for a business right here in Moorpark,” Keats said.

And that, said David Goldstein of the county’s development zone, is why officials are anxious to help finance businesses like Keats’.

Previously, Goldstein said, plastics were collected and trucked to Los Angeles where they were ground up and sold back to manufacturers in Ventura County or shipped abroad to Asian companies.

“By helping to fund these kinds of businesses, we’re not only saving money, but also creating jobs and strengthening the county’s economy,” he said. “Altogether, it’s a good move.”

Goldstein added that the county is anxious to help finance future loans for area businesses to sustain the momentum of profitable recycling.