A model of efficiency

The largest standalone bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in the Americas now is fully operational after an arduous journey from a greenfield site through a company bankruptcy and machinery commissioning challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 270,000-square-foot plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, was built by CarbonLite Holdings LLC before it was acquired by Dak Americas LLC—now Alpek Polyester USA—for $96 million when CarbonLite declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy during the early stages of commissioning.

Alpek Polyester is a subsidiary of Alpek S.A.B. de C.V., headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, and has recycling operations in Richmond, Indiana; Fayetteville, North Carolina; and Argentina. Alpek had revenue of $10.5 billion in its most recent fiscal year, with about 66 percent, or $6.9 billion, coming from the Alpek Polyester business. The company does not release U.S. sales figures.

Construction in Reading started in 2019, equipment commissioning started in early 2020 and the final production line was approved in March 2022. The process was delayed primarily because technicians from machinery manufacturers around the world could not travel because of COVID-19 restrictions, Alpek Polyester Flake Operations Manager Rodrigo Castro Uribe says.

The facility now produces bottle-grade recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET) from bottles collected mostly in New York City, Washington and Baltimore, Castro Uribe says. Most of the resin goes back to bottlers in the region, giving Alpek Polyester a key role in the area’s bottle-to-bottle circular network.

“Our mission is to promote that circularity,” says Ricky Lane, director of public affairs, trade relations and corporate communications at Alpek Polyester. “The benefit we do have is true circularity in bottle-to-bottle [recycling] by those pellets going directly back into bottles.”

Castro Uribe says approximately 95 percent of the plant’s feedstock is postconsumer material.

The plant has 60,000 tons of flake capacity per year and 45,000 tons of pellet capacity per year. Alpek Polyester declines to provide the plant’s current output but says more capacity is available as resin demand increases.

All the flake produced at the plant goes into the company’s rPET pellets.

How it works

The facility is a model of efficiency. It can take in up to 360 tons of postconsumer bottles per day through a single bottle line. Incoming bales are broken, and clear and colored bottles are separated before going through a grinder. The bottle line’s final output is prewashed flake.

Two Nashville, Tennesse-based NRT SpydIR optical sorters and two robots with Max-AI from Bulk Handling Systems (BHS), Eugene, Oregon, identify and pick out non-PET material in the stream.

Next, the material goes through one of two Sorema wash lines with a capacity of 185 tons per day for clear bottles and 53 tons per day for colored bottles and other byproducts. Separation of other polymers in the stream continues during this step, and the flake is cleaned and sorted to achieve clean, clear flake. Two flake sorters with laser Unisensors from Tomra Recycling Sorting, headquartered in Germany, handle flake sorting.

The washing process involves six steps, according to Castro Uribe. Adhesive and pieces of labels are removed, a flotation process takes out caps, material is dried and sorted by size and color contamination is removed.

The next step requires putting the clean flake through one of three extruders from Starlinger, with U.S. offices in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, that have a capacity of 47 tons per day each. Each extrusion line is equipped with a Starlinger solid-state polycondensation (SSP) reactor needed to produce food-grade material.

The extrusion step removes organic contaminants, pelletizes and crystallizes the material and increases its intrinsic viscosity (IV). The final product is a food-grade pellet.

The SSPs, which are part of the extrusion step, raise the IV of the material back to acceptable levels for food-grade applications. IV is a measure of the polymers’ molecular weight and reflects the material’s melting point, crystallinity and tensile strength. It is used to determine the right grade of PET for a particular application.

The material handling system used in Reading is from BHS, and the site features six grinders from Erema North America, Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Five silos store flake and pellets, and all material shipped in or out of the plant is by dry truck or via supersacks in dry trucks. Because there is no separate warehouse, incoming material and finished product are stored inside the plant.

Alpek Polyester does not compound material at the Reading location, but other Alpek Polyester virgin resin manufacturing sites can perform that for customers.

Since taking over plant operations, Alpek Polyester has needed to add only one flake sorter.

The facility was launched with electric power coming from three on-site diesel generators that can produce 3.6 megawatts, but a 69-kilovolt line to the plant is in the works, site Director Todd Reilly says.

The plant has 105 full-time employees—up from 70 when Alpek Polyester took over plant operations in May 2021—and runs seven days a week with two 12-hour shifts. All CarbonLite employees were retained.

Feedstock comes primarily from material recovery facilities, but Castro Uribe says the facility is trying to work with municipalities that have deposit laws. “Most of the time, those are higher-quality bales,” he says.

Positioned for success

The plant’s location also gives it a strategic advantage.

Several major bottle manufacturers are in the vicinity of Reading, which is 30 miles southwest of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Lane says Alpek Polyester is a leader in the production of virgin and recycled PET and has relationships with almost all major brands using those products. “We are the largest recycler in North America, as well as the largest PET producer, so that leadership position allows us to work with most of the major players,” he says.

Alpek Polyester expects demand for rPET to increase as laws mandating recycled content increase. “As more and more policy and legislation are put in place, there will be higher demand,” Lane says. “It will not be a demand caused by desire [to use recycled material] but by legislation. Those periods are coming soon.

“It is very important all the process steps that we have to bring true circularity, and that’s what the brand houses and the customer relationships that we have are focused on so they can make their marketing claims that they are a circular producer.”

Ron Shinn is editor of Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing and can be reached at rshinn@endeavorb2b.com.