Berry Global Group Inc. will close a bottle manufacturing facility by the end of 2020.
The plastics packaging company announced the move on Feb. 18 and filed a WARN notice for the Phillipsburg, N.J., site, according to a release. The final day of operation at the Phillipsburg plant is expected to be in December.
A statement from the Evansville, Ind.-based company said: "The decision to close the Phillipsburg facility is in support of the company's efforts to streamline operations and increase capacity utilization."
The 150,000-square-foot plant expansion opened in the spring of 2016 to manufacture health care containers, offering a "state-of-the-art" laboratory for quality control to meet health care demand. The site offered more room for manufacturing equipment and served as a warehouse.
All 150 employees will be impacted by the closure, though the company is working to help the workers find new opportunities nearby and at other Berry Global locations, the release states.
Berry Plastics has 14 facilities in the U.S. that makes plastic packaging products for the health care industry. The company has more than 290 global locations. It is No. 10 on the most recent Plastics News ranking of North American blow molders, with an estimated $520 million in blow molding sales in the region.
In July 2017, an employee at the Phillipsburg plant died after he was injured in a machine used to print labels on plastic bottles.