WIND GAP, Pa. — Officials cut the ribbon Thursday on the first building in Wind Gap’s Green Knight Industrial Park, a milestone in the multi-decade effort to turn a mountain of tires along Route 33 into economically productive land.
The new 49,000-square-foot warehouse at 20 Green Knight Dr. will soon house Trillion Sources, a third-party logistics company that has outgrown its current home in Lower Nazareth Township.
The company will use it to offer storage, order fulfillment and other logistics services to e-commerce companies, said owner Afolabi Oyerokun. It will also assemble goods into “kits” there, for example by packaging several products into a subscription box.
When Trillion Sources has fully moved in, Oyerokun said, the company will employ five people to begin with and generate one to three truck trips per day.
Their new headquarters is the first finished structure in Green Knight Industrial Park, a project of Green Knight Economic Development Corporation. The nonprofit developer works within the Pen Argyl Area School District, from which they take their name.
GKEDC administers and funds scholarships, grants, development projects and job creation incentive programs using revenue from a power plant the group owns that generates electricity by burning methane from Waste Management’s Grand Central Landfill.
Their eponymous planned industrial park includes space for six buildings in all.
JVI, the same Bushkill Township-based developer that built 20 Green Knight Dr., is also working on two more industrial buildings in the park: one covering 192,000 square feet at 45-65 Beers Way, and another at 40 Green Knight Dr. covering 52,000 square feet that will eventually house a pharmaceuticals company.
Both projects are currently working their way through the land development process. The company hopes to finish construction of both by the end of next year, said JVI owner James Vozar.
‘Challenging at best’
As recently as 2002, the 55-acre site was home to a pile of about 2 million tires visible from Route 33, one of the largest such dumps in the state.
Most of the tires were removed by 2005 using funding from the state Department of Environmental Protection. But even after the cleanup was complete, Green Knight Economic Development Corporation President Robert Cornman said, the site sat empty for years.
“There were a number of environmental issues — the tire pile was only one,” Cornman said. “The other challenging part of it is it's in three municipalities: Wind Gap, Plainfield Township and Bushkill Township.”
After it became clear that no one would build on the site in its current state, GKEDC purchased the property in 2015 in order to get it shovel-ready.
That meant cleaning up remaining tires dumped in disused quarries, remediating contaminated soil, subdividing the land to accommodate several buildings, and building infrastructure like roads and utilities.
Further complicating an already challenging project, each municipality has a different set of rules and separate processes for approving new development.
“[Wind Gap and Plainfield Township] have different requirements for the roads. Meeting all that and trying to get the two to cooperate was challenging at best.”Robert Cornman, Green Knight Economic Development Corporation President
“For example, the road here, part of it's in Wing Gap, part of it's in Plainfield [Township.] They have different requirements for the roads,” Cornman said. “Meeting all that and trying to get the two to cooperate was challenging at best.”
None of it would be possible without the group’s partners, he said, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department Environmental Protection and Department of Community and Economic Development, the Commonwealth Financing Authority and Northampton County.
Once the property was ready for construction, GKEDC reached out to developer JVI, with whom they already had a relationship.
The company already understood “the zoning of the property, and the availability of the land and the access to the highway and utilities,” Vozar said.
Now that Trillion Sources is preparing to move into their new building, Oyerokun doesn’t plan to stay there long.
By the time it's finished, the next building planned for Green Knight Industrial Park, at 192,000 square feet, should be just the right size for the growing company, he said.
