Plastics export boom has Frontier Logistics eyeing $30 million North Charleston facility
David Wren — The Post and Courier
A Texas logistics firm plans to expand its local operations with a $30 million distribution center on the old Navy base that will ship one of the East Coast's fastest-growing export commodities through the Port of Charleston.
Frontier Logistics, one of the nation's largest exporters of plastic resins made at refineries along the Gulf Coast, wants to open a 100,000-square-foot distribution center on a site adjacent to a planned rail yard to be built by Palmetto Railways, a division of the state Commerce Department. The North Charleston facility would employ about 30 workers.
Palmetto Railways wants to sell a 25.3-acre parcel for $6 million to Frontier, identified as Project FLE, and the S.C. Fiscal Accountability Authority is scheduled to review the sale next week in Columbia. If the deal is approved, Frontier would begin building the distribution center to receive shipments on existing rail lines.
The La Porte, Texas-based company eventually plans to ship about 1,000 containers of plastic resins through the port each month, according to published reports. The pellets can be used to make hundreds of products — from disposable utensils and milk jugs to toys and medical devices.
Representatives of Frontier and Palmetto Railways could not be reached for comment Tuesday. Frontier already operates a facility on North Rhett Avenue, where plastic resins are transloaded between rail cars and trucks. It also fills lined containers with plastic resins and grains at the State Ports Authority's North Charleston Terminal.
News of Frontier's proposed investment comes a week after Mid-States Packaging Inc. announced plans to open a North Charleston distribution center for plastic resins. The Massachusetts-based company hopes to export up to 10,000 cargo boxes of the commodity annually from its Goer Drive facility through the Port of Charleston.
Those distribution centers would join a 240,000-square-foot facility in Moncks Corner where A&R BulkPak packages plastic resins for overseas customers.
The boom in plastics is being driven by the Gulf Coast's glut of cheap natural gas, the key raw ingredient in resin. The chemical divisions of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Dow and other companies have responded to the shale production boom by building new resin manufacturing plants.
A report by the American Chemistry Council shows about 112 billion pounds of resins are produced annually. That amount is posing challenges for ports along the Gulf Coast, where rail delays and transportation bottlenecks are driving some distribution to the East Coast.
The Port of Charleston hopes to take advantage of the shift by offering plastics exporters more container and vessel capacity. The port currently handles about 800 cargo containers of plastic resins each month and hopes to triple that number by next year. Europe is the top market for plastic resins shipped from Charleston, followed by Latin America and Southeast Asia.
