New $61 million Frisco recycling facility boosts Collin County waste processing

The blue carts in McKinney and Frisco now have a new destination: a $61 million materials recovery facility on PGA Parkway in Frisco that is built to sort single-stream recycling from homes and businesses across Collin County and the wider Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

Circular Services marked the opening with a ribbon cutting April 16 at the 120,000-square-foot plant, just east of the Dallas North Tollway. McKinney Mayor Bill Cox and Frisco Assistant Director of Public Works Jeremy Starritt were among the local officials on hand for a project the company said had been more than a decade in the making.

The facility is designed to do more than move cans and cardboard through a bigger building. Circular Services says the plant uses optical sorters, a glass cleanup system and energy-efficient design features to improve recovery rates and push more commodities into North American markets. That matters in a fast-growing county where recycling contamination and weak commodity markets can quickly turn curbside collection into a cost rather than a revenue stream.

Ron Gonen, the company’s CEO, said the project is intended to save taxpayers landfill disposal costs and generate revenue for municipal and commercial partners by keeping valuable material in circulation. Circular Services said the Frisco site is expected to create about 53 full-time environmental jobs.

For households, the most immediate change is not a new list of what can go in the blue bin. McKinney residents still use city-provided blue carts for curbside recycling, and Frisco residential recycling is still collected weekly in blue carts by Waste Connections. What changes is what happens after the truck empties those carts. The new facility gives that material a larger, more advanced sorting line, plus a resident drop-off center for certain accepted materials that are not collected curbside.

Circular Services said the Frisco plant is part of a broader North Texas campus and one of the region’s largest recycling-infrastructure investments. The company also points to sustainability features at the site, including solar panels, passive lighting, native landscaping and EV charging stations.

That makes the new facility a visible piece of Collin County’s growth story. As Frisco and McKinney keep adding homes, stores and warehouses, the region is also adding the infrastructure needed to handle what those households throw away, and to turn more of it back into usable material instead of landfill waste.