One big undertaking

Good students know that doing their homework and studying will only help when it comes to test day. These students do not want to underperform.

In the case of Phoenix Technologies International LLC (profiled in the July 2015 issue of Recycling Today, available at http://bit.ly/2bZjpPo), ensuring that its proprietary washing and grinding line was well-designed was vital. For two years, the Bowling Green, Ohio, global producer of recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET) pellets performed a great deal of work prior to installing its own flake production line, which is on target to help Phoenix meet its goal of producing 60 million pounds of clean PET flake annually.

Phoenix uses clean post-consumer flake to create rPET pellets, which are then used to manufacture packaging for various applications, from beverages and food to personal care products and household cleaners.

In the third quarter of 2015, the company completed an $18 million expansion, adding a new washing and grinding line and giving it more control over flake production for use in its pelletizing operation. All of the flake Phoenix produces is used to manufacture its finished pellets, says Lori Carson, director of commercial operations for Phoenix.

To achieve its desired flake production, Phoenix’s line can handle 100 million pounds of infeed material, depending on the quality of the bales and how well they can be converted into raw material for the next step in its production process. The company’s 60,000-square-foot operation to convert post-consumer PET into clean flake is located near its 90,000-square-foot pellet production plant.

“Before we put our own line in, we were buying bales and having them tolled on the outside,” Carson says. “We were doing some of that so we could start to understand that full backward supply chain and what was involved in that.”

She adds, “It would have been more difficult if we opened our plant and then asked who we should buy [bales] from.”

By doing its homework, Phoenix not only strengthened its relationships with bale suppliers, but the company also was able to better understand the yield from incoming bales. Knowing this information, she says, helped Phoenix avoid designing a washing and grinding line that wasn’t in line with its needs.

“You can ask five different suppliers what the bale yield is, and you’ll get five different answers,” Carson explains. “It’s all about understanding what the answer is so your line isn’t undersized.”

TAKING CONTROL

Phoenix maintains this dedication to understanding its incoming raw material by addressing contamination in bales daily. Carson says a high degree of contamination has been challenging, noting that paper contamination is a particular problem.

The quality of PET bales has declined in the last seven years as curbside recycling programs have grown, Carson says. “And,” she continues, “as almost all streams now are single stream, you find more contamination than previously.”

Additionally, she explains that PET bottles today are “being asked to do more and more, so the makeup of bottles is more complex, leading to more [bottles] sorted out [and to] more colors.”

To deal with contamination, Carson says, the first step is to have good equipment. “Having good equipment to get the bad stuff out of there so you can have high quality coming out” is necessary, she says.

For its expansion project, Phoenix’s new equipment includes a wash line manufactured by Germany’s STF Group and supplied by Zimmer America Recycling Solutions, Cowpens, South Carolina. Carson says, “We relied on a lot of the resources of our equipment suppliers.”

After bales are delivered to the facility, they are weighed and broken open. Ferrous metal is then removed using a magnet before manual sorting removes material that could damage the equipment. The company then employs technology to sort flat material from 3-D material. The containers undergo another metal removal step via magnets and eddy currents before having their labels removed. The bottles are sorted optically to remove colored PET and non-PET. A manual sort follows to ensure product quality. The containers are washed before entering the grinder. The resulting flakes then are elutriated before entering a hot wash where they are separated by density, rinsed and dried. Elutriation is again used at this point to remove light materials. The flakes are optically sorted before being bagged or stored in silos. Phoenix bales what is left from the process, which is mostly non-PET containers that are then sold.

As pellet customers’ requirements have become even more stringent in recent years, Carson says installing this new equipment and making its own flake was fundamental to Phoenix’s future. In an effort to figure out how to improve its end product—rPET pellets—Phoenix was led to this path, she adds.

“How do we meet those tight customer requirements?” Carson says Phoenix officials asked themselves. “That’s how we knew it was time to have more control.”

SUPPLYING FEEDBACK

Working with suppliers to understand what is actually in their bales has proved to be worth the time and effort. “We spend a lot of time talking to our supply houses,” she says.

Generally, suppliers know what’s inside their bales, but sometimes they don’t know the specifics, Carson says. Phoenix sends photos at least once per week to suppliers and provides them with verbal feedback to communicate what workers find at the center of the supplied bales. Bale suppliers also are invited to visit the wash line in person.

“Most supply houses are pretty good about taking feedback from us and working through improvements,” Carson says. “It’s more work; but, at the end of the day, if it gets you a better-yielding bale, then it’s worth it.”

She says one of the challenges Phoenix faced in terms of supply was trying to vet the quality of its bale suppliers while also trying to bring a new conversion line into operation. With two sets of suppliers—one that supplies clean flake, and the other that supplies baled PET bottles—Phoenix experienced quite the juggling act.

Carson says, “Transitioning your total supply chain and trying to do that the most cost-effective way you can … it was just a juggling act to make sure we didn’t run out of one material as we were transitioning between the two supply chains.”

For the company’s pellet end users, Carson says Phoenix tried to make the switch “as seamless for them as possible.”

BETTER THAN BEFORE

Beyond the two different supply chains, as Phoenix has ramped up production on its washing and grinding line, the company has purchased baled material from suppliers closer to its northwest Ohio operations. This has resulted in a more homogenous product, Carson says.

While Phoenix’s former flake suppliers offered a quality product, Carson says, depending on their objectives, that quality would vary from supplier to supplier. She adds that flake suppliers can “have a different quality based on what they’re making it for.”

Buying flake of varying quality led Phoenix to blend incoming material to achieve a similar degree of quality, which Carson says the company is doing less of today. “We could see different quality based on different suppliers. It was the world we lived in, and we figured it out,” she says.

“Everything that comes into the door [today] is more homogenous and fits more with what we need to do with it,” Carson says, referring to the flake Phoenix makes to produce its pellets. “We do less blending because [the material] was run to our specification.”

Carson says the company has been able to improve the consistency of its rPET pellets by producing flake itself. Taking control of the process further upstream also has helped to eliminate guesswork from the pellet production process.

“We made a perfectly acceptable pellet before, but we can make a better pellet, with somewhat better economics and quality,” Carson says of the effect producing its own flake has had on its pellet manufacturing.

Now that Phoenix is producing its own flake, Carson says the company can redirect resources in-house to other aspects of the business. Without having to unpack boxes or sacks full of supplied materials and blend them to meet the company’s needs, that time can be allocated elsewhere.

Yet, as with many students, once the test is over and the results are in, it’s apparent that almost “always more time than anticipated is needed” to fully prepare, Carson says. With so many moving parts, a great deal of daily oversight goes into keeping the operation on track, both in terms of timing and cost, she says. In the end, more time would have been ideal, but it did not stop Phoenix from doing its homework and taking and passing the test in the end. Carson says, “Making your own flake is a big undertaking, and you want to be really sure of what you’re doing. We lived for a long time in the world we were in, 23 years give or take a few months, so we know it works.”

The author is associate editor of Recycling Today and can be contacted at mworkman@gie.net.