ORLANDO, FLA. (Dec. 14, 2:35 p.m. ET) Ravago Americas — a distribution, compounding and recycling firm based in Orlando — has formed a recycling services joint venture with Avangard Innovative LP.
Ravago holds a majority interest in the venture, which will operate as Ravago Avangard Innovative and will provide on-site recycling services to clients. The business will include Houston-based Avangard’s Natura recycling field services program.
“We’ll be able to provide a client with waste solutions,” Ravago Manufacturing Americas President Jim Ashton said in a recent phone interview. “We can minimize their waste and then take it away for them.”
Ravago had its own similar program “at a more elementary level,” Ashton explained. But officials realized that “we had to pick up our game and raise the bar,” he said.
“Now, we can have people on the ground at customers’ plants every day. Customers are very happy with the program. It’s all along the lines of sustainability and being green and raising awareness of the waste stream,” Ashton said.
Most of the joint venture’s current customers are on the Gulf Coast, although the service is offered nationwide. Currently, a fleet of trucks based at Avangard’s location in Pasadena, Texas, takes plastics scrap from customers’ plants to Ravago’s recycling plant in Waller, Texas.
Avangard operates almost 20 post-consumer bottle recycling plants, primarily in Mexico. Its roster of almost 100 customers includes Wal-Mart and Mexican baking giant Bimbo. In 2011, Avangard recycled almost 400 million pounds of plastic waste.
The deal is the third in the last 15 months for Ravago Americas. In late 2011, the firm bought Amco Plastic Materials Inc., a distributor and compounder in Farmingdale, N.Y. Then in mid-2012, Ravago acquired Goldsmith & Eggleton Inc., an elastomer processor and trader in Wadsworth, Ohio.
Ravago Americas’ parent firm — plastics conglomerate Ravago Group of Brussels — also owns H. Muehlstein & Co. Inc., a leading North American distributor based in Norwalk, Conn.
