SYDNEY, N.S. — The dream posed by Sydney Harbour Investment Partners, responsible for marketing a 500-acre greenfield site near the Sydport Business Park as a future container terminal, just got an injection of environmentally friendly energy.
Sydney Harbour Investment Partners released its plans Thursday for a “green design strategy” for the proposed Novazone logistics park that would complement the Novaporte container terminal for storage and transshipment purposes.
The “park-in-a-park” concept would look to grow a commercial industry around green technology and environmentally friendly practices.
Sydney Harbour Investment Partners CEO Albert Barbusci said in an interview Friday that he has secured his first tenant for his new green tech park within Novazone called NovaRe.
According to Barbusci, Michigan-based plastic waste recycler Quad City Innovations LLC has already signed on to the project.
“We’ve always been thinking about how do we make our port green? How do we find a method to get to a carbon-neutral footprint and, as I said, we stumbled into it because there are technologies out there that are leading edge and we’ve visited with a number of (these companies),” he said.
Barbusci said Quad City Innovations “checked all of those boxes” that could operate successfully in Sydney.
“QCI have been developing technologies . . . from around the world to ultimately create what they have which is a beautiful closed-loop system that would allow us to install their system at Novazone and create a park within a park.”
The company has developed three proprietary technologies to re-mine, reform and recycle nearly 100 per cent of municipal solid waste, waste plastic, scrap tires and rubber waste streams in Michigan.
Quad City Innovations indicated in a news release it processes large quantities of plastic and other solid waste into sulfur-free, carbon-free, renewable fuels suitable for use in current gasoline and diesel vehicles, locomotives, ships and other conventional diesel and gasoline industrial applications.
Quad City Innovations CEO Dean Rose said the Novazone park is the ideal location for a waste plastics-to-fuel plant.
“It gives us the opportunity to process waste streams from many regions delivered by ship, rail or road transportation. Additionally, it allows us to export our renewable fuels and chemicals via the same network,” he said in a release.
Quad City Innovations received approval last month from the Michigan Strategic Fund board to raise $60 million through private activity bond financing to build a plastics recycling plant in Michigan with the promise of creating 150 full-time jobs.
“It’s not a question of whether it will happen, it’s just a question of when.” -- Albert Barbusci
The project is expected to begin in December and will be completed over the next two years.
Barbusci said Quad City Innovations could also be operating at the NovaRe park within 24 months, with no need for a container terminal port “to be up and running.”
“It’s not a question of whether it will happen, it’s just a question of when,” he said.
“Now, we don’t have to sit and wait for the port. (NovaRe park) could be the catalyst that drives the other. We don’t know. We just know it’s the future and we want to be in the game.”
The last time Barbusci spoke publicly was in May when he announced New York City-based private equity firm Avaio Capital, a division of Aecom, would invest in the container terminal project because the firm believed the port had the greatest potential as a large greenfield site with enough acreage to support a logistics terminal. Aecom will now be in charge of Novazone’s green design.
The Avaio Capital deal came at a time when SHIP’s partnership with China Communications Construction Company Ltd. stalled due to tense diplomatic relations between the governments of Canada and China. The Chinese conglomerate had signed on to design and build the proposed container terminal a few years ago.
At this point, there has been no news of shipping customers signing on with the intent of using the proposed Novaporte container terminal.
Barbusci would not discuss whether he’s made any headway in attracting shipping lines to Sydney harbour.
Twitter: @cbpost_chris
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