Sonoco Products Co.'s plastics business is planning a new rigid container plant in New Albany, Ohio.
The new facility is expected to be operational by the end of the second quarter of 2012. The plant will join a cluster of plastics packaging facilities currently under construction in New Albany.
According to Rodger Fuller, vice president of Sonoco's global rigid paper and plastics unit, Sonoco will build a 120,000-square-foot plant and will install several PET injection stretch blow molding and injection molding lines on-site. The cost will be about $15 million and the New Albany operation will employ 60.
Company officials declined to comment on machinery to be installed at the plant.
Steve Gendreau, Sonoco Plastics' vice president and general manager for blow molding, said the New Albany plant will produce containers and components for personal-care products for Mast Global, the sourcing and logistics division of Columbus, Ohio-based Limited Brands Inc.
Limited Brands is the parent company of high-end consumer labels including Victoria's Secret, Bath and Body Works, Pink, La Senza and Henri Bendel.
Initially, Sonoco's new plant will produce products for Bath and Body Works, according to a news release from Sonoco Products.
Sonoco Plastics also operates a food-grade blow and injection molding plant in Columbus, which opened in 2008 and expanded in 2011.
According to an email from spokesman Roger Schrum, Sonoco began producing thin-wall injection molded containers and overcaps for cake frosting containers in 2010 and began providing commercial quantities in the second quarter of 2011.
Two rotary wheels at the plant produce multilayer blow molded bottles for Abbott Nutrition's Ensure protein drink, said Schrum, vice president of corporate affairs and investor relations.
Sonoco Plastics makes monolayer and multilayer blow molded bottles and jars, thermoformed cups and trays and engineered molded and extruded containers, spools and trays. The firm has 28 plastics operations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany.
For the second quarter, the firm reported profit of $53.4 million on sales of $1.1 billion, vs. profit of $59 million on sales of $1 billion for the year-ago period.
Parent Hartsville, S.C.-based Sonoco Products does about $4.1 billion in sales and operates more than 300 facilities in 34 countries.
Scott McAfee, a spokesman for the city of New Albany, said Sonoco is the eighth commercial commitment to what the city calls its “personal-care and beauty campus.”
“Each company at this campus is playing a leading role in the vertical supply chain, to quickly and cost-effectively turn concepts into products and get them on shelves,” McAfee said.
Lewis Center, Ohio-based contract packager Accel Inc. is building a $20 million, 510,000-square-foot headquarters at the business park, and Mississauga, Ontario-based blow molder Axium Plastics LLC is building an 110,000-square-foot plant there at a cost of $16 million.
