TALKE USA, Chambers County Build Recycling Center
August 5, 2025
TALKE USA’s commitment to supporting a circular economy and Chambers County’s need for a new plastic recycling center and two years of planning have reached a milestone with the groundbreaking for a new Recycling Support Center.
The site will be next to TALKE USA’s headquarters building on Langston Drive in Mont Belvieu.
“This new support facility is a tangible step in expanding our contribution to a circular economy,” Richard Heath, CEO & President of TALKE USA, told those assembled Friday morning, Aug. 1.
Chambers County is contributing $1 million toward construction of the plant, which will contribute to advanced recycling and mechanical recycling efforts by processing post-consumer plastic materials.
At the TALKE facility, these materials will be received and formed into bales. The material will be further processed at Cyclyx’s new Houston-based Circularity Center and converted into ISCC-PLUS-certified recycling feedstock.
TALKE USA is the American arm of a global business named after founder Alfred Talke and headquartered in Hürth, Germany. It operates two dozen worldwide locations reaching from Southeast Asia through Europe and the Middle East to North America.
The Mont Belvieu location operates more than 100 trucks that carry plastic pellets manufactured at the ExxonMobil’s Mont Belvieu Plastics Plant to the Port of Houston for shipping around the world.
Those pellets are made into all sorts of consumer and industrial products.
“As a logistics services provider for the petrochemical industry, TALKE USA has handled over 26 billion pounds of virgin plastics, which is obviously a huge amount,” Heath said. “This is the beginning of a project that brings sustainability, responsibility, innovation and community partnership.”
Chambers County Commissioner Tommy Hammond, whose Precinct 3 includes Mont Belvieu, said he met with Heath over two years ago to discuss the recycling project.
“Several years ago, Chambers County had to shut down our plastics recycling program, because it wasn’t working at all,” Hammond said. The majority of what we took in ended up back in the landfill, anyways.
“Hopefully what we’re building here is a long-term solution for recycling.”
The City of Mont Belvieu’s city manager, Brian Winningham, joined Chambers County Judge Jimmy Sylvia and Hammond on the stage for a short program prior to the men picking up shovels and turning them ceremoniously in a pit of dirt provided for the occasion.
Mont Belvieu opened a recycling center in January for its residents and the number of households taking advantage has steadily grown.
“We need a place to take our plastic (after citizens drop it off) and that plastic will come here to get baled and get shuffled toward advance recycling,” Winningham said.
“When the facility at Talke opens, we will be able to grow the plastics recycling part of the City’s program to allow our residents to do more so we can take less to the landfill.”
ExxonMobil has been a pioneer in advanced recycling, which it introduced in Baytown in 2022. The process, which has greatly increased the variety of plastic products that can be recycled, can turn plastics back into recycling feedstock.
That initial plant at Baytown processed more than 70 million pounds of plastic through October 2024. The company plans to open new advanced recycling plants in Baytown and Beaumont in 2026.
Sylvia was impressed with the the partners’ work that went into getting to the start of the TALKE USA plant.
“When you’ve got two levels of government involved in a project and it happens in two years, that’s pretty damn good. So I’m proud,” he said.
“I do want to thank the partners at Exxon and the City of Mont Belvieu. That’s a great partnership. And if you didn’t know it, I’m retiring at the end of next year. I’m going to need a place to recycle all those plastic signs I used in all those elections for 30-plus years.”