First PET Recycling Coalition grants announced

The Recycling Partnership announced last week three grants awarded to increase polyethylene terephthalate (PET) capture through its PET Recycling Coalition, awarding two PET reclaimers and a material recovery facility (MRF) as the first recipients of the its grant program.

According to The Recycling Partnership, the initial round of grants will result in more than 2.5 million pounds per year of new PET capture and 50 million pounds per year of new reclamation capacity as well as provide access to thermoform recycling to the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.

The exact amount of each grant was not disclosed.

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“These projects will deliver the types of improvements that we view as being essential to the future of PET recycling,” says Adam Gendell, director of system optimization at the Washington-based Recycling Partnership. “By helping MRFs and PET reclaimers capture and recover more of the material in their facilities, we will see meaningful gains in the amount of PET recycled in the short term, and by helping to grow reclamation capacity, we will ensure there is robust infrastructure ready to handle future growth in PET recycling.”

DAK Americas LLC, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based integrated PET resin producer, has received a grant to help with the implementation of a new robotic sorter at its PET reclamation facility in Richmond, Indiana. The sorter will be installed on one of the facility’s outbound lines, capturing PET bottles, thermoforms, pigmented opaque PET items that previously were comingled with undesired non-PET plastics and other byproduct commodities, allowing the facility to improve efficiency and produce more recycled content.

The company previously invested $32 million to expand that facility in 2020 with help from a $140,000 Economic Development Income Tax grant to help with equipment and machinery costs, building construction adjacent land and employee training.

Direct Pack Recycling, an Azusa, California-based PET reclaimer and packaging company, received a grant to assist in the construction of a new PET reclamation operation in Mexicali, Mexico, which will source material from MRFs across the U.S. and produce a significant amount of recycled content for new packaging.

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Both DAK Americas and Direct Pack Recycling specialize in recycling pigmented and opaque PET, and The Recycling Partnership says the grants enable both facilities to grow and improve their recycling of the entirety of the PET recycling stream.

Direct Pack Recycling also specializes in recycling thermoformed PET packaging like cups, clamshells and trays, and has the capacity to recycled 20,000 tons of PET per year. The company says it has recycled more than 74.4 million pounds of plastics since 2020 and repurposed the material back into new packaging.

Finally, Pittsburgh-based MRF operator Recycle Source has received a grant to upgrade automated sorting technology at its MRF in Pittsburgh, increasing the efficiency of PET capture and, The Recycling Partnership says, resulting in a significant increase in the overall amount of PET the MRF delivers to reclaimers. The new technology also will improve the MRF’s ability to detect and sort thermoforms.

“We are pleased that these projects address the entirety of the PET recycling stream—bottles, thermoforms and pigmented and opaque PET—and we’re excited to build on these early successes with our next round of granted projects,” Gendell says.

The PET Recycling Coalition was launched in June 2022 and looks to improve PET circularity and transform the recycling system by increasing capture rates through improved efficiency, technology, infrastructure and access.

The National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) reported in December 2022 that the U.S. recycling rate for postconsumer PET increased to 28.6 percent in 2021, up from 27.1 percent in 2020, and the North American rate (U.S., Canada and Mexico) increased to 36.8 percent, up from 34.2 percent in 2020.

According to NAPCOR, there were a number of first-time achievements in PET recovery, including the largest amount of postconsumer PET ever collected, with PET bottle collection in the U.S. exceeding 1.9 billion pounds, and thermoforms collected for recycling in the U.S. and Canada reached a record-setting 142 million pounds.

The coalition’s goals to further these achievements include increasing capture by 250 million pounds per year by 2027, increasing the PET bottle recycling rate to more than 30 percent, achieve more than 60 percent access for PET thermoforms by 2025 and create “resilient recycling in proactive and at scale” for pigmented and opaque PET by 2025.

Through its grant program, the PET Recycling Coalition says it envisions a thriving PET recycling system that captures significantly more material, improving PET packaging circularity.

The Recycling Partnership did not say when the next round of funding would be announced.