CarbonLITE Recycling LLC, a producer of bottle-grade postconsumer recycled polyethylene terephthalate (pcrPET) has announced that it has signed contracts with AMUT North America. Vaughan, Ontario, for the supply of primary processing equipment to be installed in its new plastic recycling facility in Abilene, Texas.
The 200,000-square-foot plant is expected to recycle about 100 million pounds of beverage bottles annually into PET pellets that can be used to make new bottles. The CarbonLITE group currently operates a similar facility in Riverside, California, with annual capacity of 100 million pounds.
AMUT machinery and technology will be used in many steps involved in cleaning the PET bottle stream starting with the DLB-60 model label-removal technology with particular focus on the full-body shrink sleeve label. Additionally the patented AMUT PW-180/5 high-friction, whole bottle wash technology will be incorporated for cleaning the bottles prior to the AMUT wet grinding process. For the final cleaning of the PET flakes AMUT supply its patented hot-flake friction washing technology AX 150/5 machinery.
The food-grade purification and pelletizing will use the Prime technology from Erema North America Inc. The new plant’s front-end, bale opening and bottle sorting operations will be built by Bulk Handling Systems of Eugene, Oregon, using sorting modules from its subsidiary, NRT of Nashville, Tennessee. The total investment in equipment and infrastructure will exceed $60 million.
CarbonLITE President Neville Browne says, “We have had a very important learning curve in Riverside that has played and will continue to play, a critical role in both the design and implementation of our plans for Abilene.”
CarbonLITE has a strategic alliance with Nestlé Waters North America and its Abilene plant will be supplying Nestlé’s bottling facilities near Dallas.
“The beverage bottling giants are all committed to incorporating postconsumer material into their bottles,” he says. “Some companies are more aggressive than others, and Nestlé is certainly leading the charge with its 50-percent post-consumer initiatives. We have total confidence in the market for high-quality postconsumer PET material. The only defense for single-use plastic packaging is to make certain it is made from earlier generations of itself rather than from virgin raw material. New plastic bottles should be made from old plastic bottles. That’s the ultimate sustainability.”
Installation of the equipment in Abilene will begin in Q4 2014 with first production expected in Q2 2015.