Who Takes Your Spent Carbon on the Gulf Coast?

Calgon Carbon put out a release last Wednesday saying it had finished expanding its plant at Crosby, Texas.

The phrase nearly doubl- appears in it four times. A tonnage appears zero times.

No pounds per year, no furnace count, no headcount for the site, no capital number past multi-million-dollar. Two executives are quoted and neither of them sizes anything.

"If the plant that takes your spent carbon just doubled, and nobody published the number, what did you actually get?"

Something real. The case for it sits in the customs data rather than in anything Calgon said: new activated carbon landed in the United States at $3.42 a kilo across the first seven months of this year, against $2.62 over the same months of 2024, and 4.8% less tonnage came in than last year (chart below).

Five Plants, Then Six

Go back to May 14, 2024. Calgon announced an exclusive agreement to buy the industrial reactivated carbon business of Sprint Environmental Services, 21 employees and one reactivation plant outside Houston.

The same release describes the fleet it was adding to, and this is the sentence worth keeping: "The Company currently has five strategically located reactivation plants across the United States, two of which are capable of handling RCRA hazardous waste."

Five. By February of this year the company's own count is six, and the arithmetic only closes one way.

The state paperwork dates the handover precisely. Texas air authorization 149303 sits on regulated entity RN106714843, the Carbon Regeneration Facility at 4101 Barbers Hill Road, and Calgon's change-of-ownership form puts the effective date at July 1, 2024, signed on July 16 by the site's plant manager.

So the clock on this one runs 828 days, from a signature to a ribbon.