Plastic Bottle Recycler to Build Third US Plant in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania : CarbonLITE to Recycle 2bn PET Bottles in New Facility Following Nestlé Waters Deal
Nestlé Waters North America has signed a significant agreement with recycled PET plastic (rPET) supplier CarbonLITE, which will expand its US operations by building a third facility in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania.
The new contract builds upon Nestlé Waters’ existing relationship with CarbonLITE, one of the largest producers of food-grade, post-consumer rPET, and allow the beverage company to further expand use of recycled materials in its packaging. The company currently purchases rPET from CarbonLITE’s existing facilities in California and Texas.
“We are pleased that CarbonLITE will be locating a facility in a region important to our manufacturing footprint,” said Bill Trackim, Vice President, Head of Supply Chain and Procurement at Nestlé Waters North America. “Being able to purchase rPET in the area helps us better support the regional economy while promoting environmental sustainability through the use of renewable and recyclable materials in our packaging.”
CarbonLITE anticipates that the facility will be in full production by early 2020, and will have the ability to recycle over 2 billion post-consumer bottles a year. The new 200,000-square-foot processing facility is anticipated to save 60,000 tonnes of carbon annually by using post-consumer materials and produce 80 million pounds per year of food-grade rPET pellets.
“Nestlé Waters continues to be a leader in their sustainability efforts,” says Leon Farahnik, Chairman of CarbonLITE Industries, LLC. “We are proud to have grown with them for the past seven years and proud to expand our relationship in our state of the art facility in Pennsylvania”.
Nestlé Waters, which has two bottling facilities in the Lehigh Valley, uses recycled plastic in a number of its brands including Nestlé Pure Life® and Deer Park® which are bottled locally. The company has been increasing the amount of rPET it uses in its packaging since 2011, and in February 2018, Nestlé Waters launched a 700ml Nestlé Pure Life® bottle made of 100 percent rPET.
In California, all of the company’s single-serve sizes of Arrowhead® Brand Mountain Spring Water and Nestlé® Pure Life®bottles produced in the state are made with 50 percent rPET.
Nestlé Waters’ parent company, Nestlé SA, is a signatory of the recently announced New Plastics Economy Global Commitment. An initiative of The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and UN Environment, the “Global Commitment” is an agreement to ensure that 100% of plastic packaging can be reused, recycled or composted by 2025.
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