West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice announced 40 full-time jobs are coming to Quincy as part of a $50 million investment.

CleanVision Corp. is building a manufacturing facility in the eastern Kanawha County community to convert plastic into clean energy. A worldwide corporation, this would be the first manufacturing facility for the company in the United States.

"It couldn't be a better place for us," Dan Bates, CEO of CleanVision Corp., told Eyewitness News.

By the start of next year, the old 84 Lumber building in Quincy will be converted into a recycling facility.

Plastic is made from different materials labeled with numbers one through seven. No. 1 and No. 2 plastics -- like milk cartons, food bottles and buckets -- are the easiest to recycle. For many different reasons, No. 3 through No. 7 are more tricky. These include plastic bags, styrofoam, straws and prescription bottles.

Because so many types of plastic are hard to recycle, only about 7% actually end up completing the recycling process. The others are filtered out. That's where CleanVision comes in with their company, Clean-Seas.

"We are going to recycle the hard-to-recycle stuff," Bates said.

State leaders are excited about the opportunity because of the jobs and investment that will come with it.

"What would we have given not very long ago to have had 40 great paying jobs coming into eastern Kanawha County?" Gov. Jim Justice said.

It could also be a huge opportunity for the whole country to reduce plastic waste. Before 2018, the US would ship millions of tons of trash to China for recycling. Even after all that fuel and expense to ship it across the world, much of the hard-to-recycle plastic would end up in a landfill anyway or get incinerated, according to National Geographic.

In 2018, China quit taking the world's trash through its National Sword law. Leading countries to find another way to recycle.

"It makes no sense to have a product shipped across the ocean and then have it dumped or incinerated," Bates said. "We can do it here, right in our backyard and really start to make a difference."

Bates said it was a call from Del. Daniel Linville (R-Cabell) that attracted him to the state. Linville told Bates on the phone about West Virginia's location. He said it was a prime spot on the east coast to deliver the nation's recyclables.

"I guess it's three hours from 80% of the population of the United States. We're centrally located in the mid-Atlantic region. There's plenty of waste plastic that can be accessed. And we can build conversion facilities in West Virginia," Bates said. "And I said, 'Del. Linville, I'm on my way.'"

The company plans to start out small, focusing on recycling a hundred tons of plastic from industrial sources. Eventually, they want to start a recycling program to take all of West Virginia's hard-to-recycle plastics. Bates said he's not sure what that's going to look like yet.

"Does that mean we have to find a bunch of blue bins and put them in front of everybody's house? I don't know. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes," he said.

Bates said they're planning to have the facility up and running by the first quarter of 2024.