GE Capital’s loan helps grow 150 jobs in Shreveport

Paper chase: Like its sister mills in New York City and Conyers, Ga., the Shreveport facility, seen above, will recycle paper and old corrugated containers that would have otherwise gone to landfills. Every year the three Pratt paper mills combined will recycle more than 1 million tons of paper — preventing approximately 1.2 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions and saving 13 million trees. Images courtesy of PrattIndustries.com.

At today’s event, members of GE Capital’s Structured Finance Group were on hand to celebrate as Pratt Industries’ Chairman Anthony Pratt formally opened the Recycled Paperboard Mill & Material Recovery Facility. Located at The Port of Shreveport, the plant will use wastepaper to produce approximately 360,000 tons of 100 percent recycled containerboard per year. The site is also home to Pratt’s new Material Recovery Facility, which collects paper, plastic and glass from city homes and processes them for re-use. In the audio clip below, Jeff Lupoff, who heads up GE Capital’s Structured Finance Group, talks about the double win in the project: Jobs and helping the environment.

Pratt Industries USA is one of the country’s largest paper and packaging companies with manufacturing facilities in 20 states. And Pratt takes its environmental contribution seriously – as visitors to its website can see firsthand with the constantly updated calculators that show how its efforts have made a difference each day. Trees saved today: 27,987. Greenhouse emissions saved today: 1,343 tons. Gallons of water saved today: 4,480,944. And landfill space saved today: 2,801 yards. (And that was a few seconds ago!) In the audio clip below, Pratt Industries’ Michael O’Regan underscores the recycling work that’s now underway.

As Jeff mentioned in his audio clip, the loan to Pratt is what’s called a “greenfield” project, which essentially refers to an industrial project that starts from scratch, as opposed to one that is an upgrade or change to an existing project. While GE Capital is making loans everyday to small and medium-sized businesses across the U.S., so-called greenfield projects usually take longer to develop — anywhere from six months to a year — because they are much more complex and involve more risk. In the case of Pratt’s loan, a GE team with in-depth corrugated packaging manufacturing knowledge, project financing expertise, and experience in investing in capital intensive, cyclical industries, worked closely with Pratt to understand their needs and provide financing to match. As Jeff writes in a white paper, greenfield industrial project financing can be a recipe for success for “smart businesses” that “are looking around the corner for opportunities amidst the recovery.”

* Read the Port of Shreveport’s original release about the plant
* Read “Dallas keeps on truckin’ with GE Capital” on GE Reports
* Read about GE Capital’s work with Boscov’s department store
* Read GE Reports’ 5-part series on GE Capital, “My Favorite Slide”
* Read about GE Capital’s investment partnership with Mubadala Development Co.