Evergreen and Peninsula upgrade PET recycling plants

Two recyclers recently completed or are planning multi-million dollar upgrades to their California PET recycling facilities. Details of the project by Evergreen and Peninsula Plastics Recycling include:

Evergreen Improves Sorting at California Plant

Evergreen is in the middle of a major upgrade to its Riverside, California recycling plant. This is the latest in a series of expansion projects for his PET recyclers nationwide.

Evergreen is part of strap product manufacturer Greenbridge, which is owned by private equity firm The Sterling Group.Evergreen Acquires Riverside Factory at auction In 2021, after the previous owner CarbonLite, filing for bankruptcyAlso last year, Evergreen launched the following projects: Install a major upgrade at a recycling plant in Clyde, Ohio. purchased Our PET recycling plants in Albany, NY and Amherst, Nova Scotia provide a coast-to-coast footprint.

In an interview with Plastics Recycling Update, Evergreen’s chief operating officer, Greg Johnson, said that the Riverside mill used Grade A PET bales or those collected through the state’s bottle invoices, the California Redemption Value (CRV) program. said it was designed to run

Equipment upgrades are required to better handle Grade A bales, but Evergreen recycles curb PET or Grade B bales to produce RPET for customers outside the food and beverage market He said he sometimes uses the system to

“We’re definitely doing a significant upgrade to enhance the front-end functionality, but it was also needed for the A grade,” explains Johnson. “This is not a wholesale switch. I’m not going to stop buying CRVs and go for MRF-generated bales. That’s for sure.”

Riverside’s improvements began over a year ago with the installation of six sorting robots, followed by the installation of an optical sorter in February 2022, and other separation and processing equipment, including a label stripper, in September 2022. ended with the addition of He said the Riverside plant would have similar sorting capacity to the Clyde plant.

Johnson also said that all of the company’s U.S. facilities use robots supplied by AMP Robotics, with six each in Riverside and Clyde, and three in Albany.

He said the amount invested in the equipment was not immediately available.

When asked about the effects recent sharp decline Regarding the value of the company’s recycled PET, Johnson said Evergreen has been in the food-grade RPET market for a long time.

“It has definitely been a volatile market these days, but we will get through it and continue to focus on the long term,” he said.

Peninsula Plastic Recycling Upgrade

California will provide a $5 million loan to help Peninsula Plastics Recycling increase the capacity of its PET recycling plant by up to 50%.

California Department of Resource Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) on October 7 approved Loan for recycling market development zone for Peninsula.

member of Merlin Group, a plastic recycling company, Peninsula Plastics Recycling was established in 2008. The company recycles his used PET bottles into his RPET pellets for use in food and beverage packaging.

The $5 million loan will be used to install additional equipment at the Turlock, California facility near Modesto in the Central Valley.

According to CalRecycle’s loan approval document, “The additional equipment will remove more contaminants from the PET bales and improve the quality of the PET pellets that can be recycled into beverage bottles.”

According to the document, the project will increase recycling capacity from about 20,000 to 30,000 tons per year and create 14 new jobs.

This isn’t the first time a refurbishing company has received funding from the California government. Peninsula, January 2019 received A $4 million loan from the state. This funding is a combination of Recycling Market Development Zone Program funding and Greenhouse Gas Reduction Revolving Loan Program funding. The money was used to install a recycling facility and a solar power system.

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