Alcoa Inc. will close its thermoforming plant in Vermont and consolidate those operations into a Kentucky facility that makes a similar product line.
The 45,000-square-foot Rutland, Vt., site will close Feb. 28, affecting 25 hourly and seven salaried workers who will receive severance packages, said Paula Quick, spokeswoman for Reynolds Food Packaging, an Alcoa unit based in Richmond, Va.
The company has space at its plastics processing facility in Mount Vernon, Ky. Both facilities make containers used in microwavable packaging for food-service applications, according to Quick.
Space was cleared at the 159,000-square-foot Kentucky plant almost a year ago, when Richmond-based Alcoa Flexible Packaging sold the facility's injection molding assets to Evansville, Ind.-based Berry Plastics Corp.
Alcoa Flexible Packaging, a separate business unit from its food-packaging group, laid off 129 people in Mount Vernon when the molding assets were sold. About 140 people continued to work at the plant after the sale.
``Because of the asset sale [to Berry], it opened efficient production and warehouse space for our thermoforming operations,'' Quick said. ``We had excess capacity and two plants making similar products that could be better handled by one facility.''
The Rutland plant was founded in 1978 as Qualitad Sales Corp,, before being sold in 1999 to Richmond-based Reynolds Metals Co. A year later, Reynolds was purchased by Pittsburgh-based aluminum giant Alcoa.