About Green Reclamation
Green Reclamation, a division of Moses B. Glick LLC, is an industrial scrap and salvage company that specializes in liquidations. It is headquartered in Fleetwood, Penn.
“We travel up and down the East Coast, mostly, and work with liquidations, to buy and sell used equipment,” said Mark Frank, Vice President of Operations for Green Reclamation.
The company will take “a green approach to demolition” of the former Hamilton paper mills, Frank said.
“We’d like to save all of the buildings, but some of them have no other uses than paper manufacturing,” he said. “Moses is Amish, so he believes in preserving everything, to keep things out of the landfills.”
“It takes us a lot longer to do the demolition because we save everything,” Frank said.
Last week, workers were carefully dismantling a large area of roof that was made of thick timbers of yellow pine. The company will also save as much of the brick as possible, as well as various pieces of metal used to mount machinery or give structural support to the roofs.
“It’s also taking longer because of the age of the building,” Frank said. “It was built in bits and pieces, so there’s no one drawing that says where everything is, so we have to look around to find all of the utility cut-offs.”
The former paper mill along North B Street will soon get new life as Champion Mill Business Park, bringing jobs and a paper manufacturing facility to Hamilton.
Zumbiel Packaging and NewPage will be leasing space in one of the buildings west of North B Street to create packaging materials, according to Mark Frank, Vice President of Operations for Green Reclamation.
The buildings are the property of Green Reclamation, a division of Moses B. Glick LLC, an industrial scrap and salvage company that specializes in liquidations.
Zumbiel plans to employ about 20 people and run three shifts, Frank said.
Green Reclamation has already started work on the 31,000-square-foot office building that faces the Black Street Bridge, with careful attention to retaining the decorative architecture.
The company will be able to subdivide and lease it out in portions, Frank said. The long-term goal is to preserve as much of the buildings as possible, and what can’t be preserved can be dismantled and used in the redevelopment, he said.
“We’ll offer low leases and work with the city to see what we can do to entice new businesses to come in here,” Frank said.
A restoration company will be leasing some of the buildings behind the office, employing up to 10 people, starting in about four months, according to Frank.
Plans are in the works, but not finalized, to create an indoor sports complex that might include two baseball diamonds and other amenities, Frank said, including restaurants and fitness facilities.
“So if you’ll be dropping your kid off to play ball, you can go to a gym and work out or you can go to the bar,” Frank said. “They know the tie to baseball here, and if they can come up with the funding, it would be an anchor to the west end and attract people to come to Hamilton.”
Some of the buildings will be demolished because they were built specifically for paper-making machinery and don’t have prospects for re-purposing, Frank said.
The buildings on the east side of North B Street, those facing the river, are owned by the city, which has been approached by a number of different projects, but “we’ve been very careful about what we do with that” 500,000 square feet, said Jody Gunderson, the city’s Director of Development.
First, Gunderson said, a study must be done for possible contaminants to see what would be required before more extensive reclamation work can begin. The city and the Moses Glick group will share a $160,000 Clean Ohio grant to do a study of possible contaminants on the site.
“This is going to be a good example of what a public-private partnership can accomplish,” Gunderson said.
Frank said that knowing what an arts-oriented city Hamilton is, Green Reclamation has saved back some of the machinery, rolls and gears to make them available for local artists who participate in a competition that is being planned.
“We’re to try to orchestrate a design contest to have someone create a sculpture here to preserve the paper machinery and pay tribute to the property’s history,” Frank said.
The company is also planning a public auction featuring some of the building’s artifacts.
“In August, we’ll have a vintage industrial auction,” Frank said. “We’re keeping about 3,000 tons of material, not including brick, for people who want to have some of this vintage stuff as an artifact.”
“A guy called us wanting some bricks so he could build a fire pit, so we thought we should do this,” he said.
The auction will include panels of decorative reinforced glass, various tanks and carts and dozens of star-shaped brick tie-backs that people have been very interested in, Frank said.
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