Plastics

Evergreen to expand rPET production

Plastics recycling company Evergreen is undergoing an expansion at its plant in Clyde, Ohio, that will double its food-grade recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) processing capacity from roughly 40 million pounds annually to 80 million pounds annually, says Greg Johnson, Evergreen corporate vice president.

Late last year, the company added six robots on its sorting line that were supplied by Amp Robotics of Denver. The robotic sorters are after the optical sorters on the whole bottle sorting line, and Johnson says they have helped to improve the consistency and quality of the material. He adds that the robots are negatively sorting the PET bottles, removing colored bottles or those with certain labels and non-PET bottles that may have gotten past the optical sorters. He says the robots provide the “final polish” and “are not a replacement for optical sorters.”

Johnson says Evergreen is upgrading four of the six optical flake sorters on its wash line with equipment from Germany-based Tomra Sorting Recycling.

To accommodate a third pelletizing line, Evergreen is expanding the size of its 240,000-square-foot facility by 54,000 square feet. The pelletizing line will be supplied by Vienna-based Starlinger. Johnson says Evergreen’s other two pelletizing lines were supplied by Erema, an Austrian company with a U.S. subsidiary in Ipswich, Massachusetts, including a Vacurema Advanced extrusion system installed in 2004 and a Vacurema Prime extrusion system installed in 2011.

Evergreen also will install two solid-state polycondensation reactors from Starlinger on two of its pelletizing lines. The reactors decontaminate the flakes and increase the intrinsic viscosity of the rPET pellets, according to Starlinger.

Johnson says the building will be done in the fourth quarter of this year, and the new pelletizing line is expected to come online in mid-2022.

Additionally, Evergreen’s parent company, Polychem LLC of Mentor, Ohio, has announced a new name and a new business strategy. The company, which provides end-of-line packaging solutions, has changed its name to Greenbridge, which it says better reflects its portfolio of products and services, which includes helping companies meet their circular economy goals and reduce their reliance on landfills.