Mexican recycling company Zerluma has broken ground on a new $50 million industrial facility in the Rio Grande Valley, marking another manufacturing investment for the South Texas border region. The project represents a sizable commitment to aluminum production capacity aimed at serving customers across North America.
The development, planned as a 90,000-square-foot plant, is located at 300 Trinity St. in Mission. Once complete, the facility will manufacture aluminum billets, supplying semi-finished product to a range of downstream industrial users. The site lies just north of the Mexican border, positioning the plant to tap into cross-border supply chains and regional logistics networks.
Zerluma’s plant is designed to produce aluminum billets, which are solid, semi-finished blocks or cylinders of cast aluminum. These billets are used as raw feedstock in several manufacturing processes, including CNC machining, extrusion, and forging. By adding billet-making capacity in the Rio Grande Valley, the project aims to support a variety of metalworking and fabrication operations that depend on consistent, scalable aluminum inputs.
The company expects the Mission facility to generate 70 permanent jobs once operations begin, providing new employment opportunities in the local industrial labor market. Zerluma also projects the plant will contribute approximately $120 million in annual economic impact, reflecting both direct activity at the site and indirect effects across the regional supply chain and service providers.
The new recycler-led project comes as the broader Rio Grande Valley continues to attract manufacturing investment. In nearby McAllen, a European automotive supplier has committed to a $225 million production facility, expanding the region’s role in the automotive and advanced manufacturing ecosystem. This additional production footprint further underscores how the corridor is drawing capital tied to industrial and trade-oriented uses.
Further east along the coast, the Port of Brownsville has secured billions of dollars in planned investment across a diverse group of industrial and infrastructure users. Autonomous shipbuilder Saronic Technologies, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Turkish energy company Karpowership and other firms have each announced significant projects tied to the port area. Together, these commitments highlight a broader pattern of large-scale industrial and logistics-related development across the Rio Grande Valley.
Within this context, Zerluma’s aluminum recycling and billet manufacturing plant adds a materials-focused industrial use to a regional pipeline that already includes automotive production, maritime technology, space-related operations, and power-focused assets. The clustering of projects across Mission, McAllen and Brownsville suggests that the Rio Grande Valley is emerging as a hub for capital-intensive industrial investment serving North American trade flows.
