West Columbia, SC (WLTX) - Global Plastic Grinders in West Columbia says they may have to lay off as many as 50 employees after the city issued a stop work order last week.

The company says they are being targeted unfairly after the World Wide Recycle Plant in Cayce caught fire back on June 29th. That fire burned for 3 days, and the owners and plant manager were arrested and charged with not following city burning ordinances.

Global Plastics says they're not affiliated with the recycling plant, and have been in meetings with the city for the past two weeks to try get permission to reopen.

"We're appealing the work stop order so we can get our people back to work," said Doug Leonard of Global Plastics. "As you can imagine this is costing us tens of thousnads of dollars a day to be down. But the more important issue is we've got employees that are really good people and they're hard workers and they need to work and we're a business and we need to operate."

West Columbia Mayor Joe Owens tells us the plant has never had a proper fire inspection and the city has allowed them to operate despite that. He says right now they don't know if the plant is safe or now, so they shut them down until they make that determination.