Burlington’s planning and zoning commission has given its unanimous nod to a local company’s plans to revamp a derelict textile plant to serve as new, state-of-the-art recycling facility.
The commission’s members voted 6-to-0 on Monday to recommend the approval of a request from Saxapahaw-based Topia Holdings to allow this transformation to take place on an 8.5-acre site just north of the railroad tracks.
Consisting of 18 parcels on either side of North Park Avenue’s juncture with Elmira Street, the proposed site of this recycling center was once home to a division of Burlington Industries. More recently, it has hosted Carolina Dyeing and Finishing and a local shipping and receiving firm called Rapid Transit before Topia purchased the property in 2025.
A specialist in “post-industrial plastic conversion,” Topia intends to “recycle” the existing structure to house a new, cutting-edge operation that could ultimately employ as many as 100 people.
According to Ryan Moffitt, a Burlington lawyer in Topia’s employ, this proposed enterprise will also breathe new life into a site that would, otherwise, be a liability to the community.
“It has not been very usable as of late,” Moffitt explained when he presented his client’s plans to the planning commission’s members. “Not only was it obsolete, it was blighted, and it was contaminated…the Topia group purchased it knowing full well what they were buying…[because they] saw an opportunity to make it useful again.”
Moffitt added that the existing facility has quite a few legacy features that his client will have to modernize before it can set up shop in this location. These holdovers include the property’s heavy industrial zoning, which Moffitt said will have to be updated to fit Topia’s intended use.
“This building, consisting of 216,500 square feet, has been in the city for more than a century,” the attorney explained when he appeared before the planning commission. “Being more than a century old, it doesn’t line up with any of the zoning districts in the city, frankly…and the reason we’re making the request is to bring the site up-to-date.”
In order to accommodate the operations of a recycling center, Topia has asked the city to relabel the property with a “conditional industrial” designation that would permit a recycling center and about 30 other industrial uses. Topia has also attached 13 development conditions to its rezoning request that, among other things, restrict the facility’s footprint to its current dimensions.
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This proposed change in the property’s zoning is just one of the many changes that in store for the property as it’s transformed from a defunct textile plant into a bustling new recycling business.
Alex Long, the CEO of Topia Holdings, told the commission’s members that his firm plans to use this facility to process scrap from other businesses rather than household waste that area resident would be able to drop off as they do at the county landfill. These materials will include plastic spools and pallets discarded by local industries as well as manufacturing byproducts from production facilities like automotive factories.
“For every car you buy, there’s multiple of that material that went into making that car,” he went on to elaborate. “At the full production capacity for this facility, we should be able to process 8 million pounds a month of plastic.”
Long said that his facility will initially transform this scrap into a raw “regrind or flake,” which some businesses are able to use in their manufacturing processes. He added that Topia eventually plans to acquire the equipment needed to further refine these regrinds into pellets that have a broader array of potential applications.
Long told the city’s planning commission that his “employee-owned company” has already plowed about $3.65 million into its proposed recycling center in the anticipation of a favorable ruling on its rezoning request. He added that, in the long run, this investment will be a boon for the rest of the community thanks to impact he expects the operation to have on the local job market.
“Right now,” he added, “there’s 50 people, including contractors, working [on site], and we expect there to be 100 people working there if we can get the operation up to the size that the building can handle.”
Moffitt, meanwhile, assured the commission’s members that Topia’s plans will have other potential benefits as they bring a now desolate manufacturing plant back into productive use.
The company’s attorney acknowledged that this project has been complicated by underground contamination that harks back to the site’s former uses. He added that the property’s “brownfield” status has compelled Topia to leave the existing structure intact while carrying out a metamorphosis that he said has already borne visible results.
“This has been a huge undertaking,” the attorney added. “There is a lot of work going on in the interior, and in the last 60 days it has become a much different facility.”
The planning commission’s members proceeded to vote 6-to-0 to endorse the rezoning request to Burlington’s city council, which the city’s planning director expects to hold a public hearing on the proposal on May 19.
