Placon boosts its PET recycling with help from Recycling Partnership grant

A grant from a national recycling nonprofit will help a Wisconsin thermoformer capture more recycled PET for use in new products and capture more of the recovered material closer to home.

The $100,000 grant from The Recycling Partnership is helping pay for the installation of new optical sortation equipment that will segregate more PET containers as they flow through the front end of Placon Corp.'s recycling line as well as better sort processed flake on the back end of the line.

Kali Kinziger is product manager at the Madison-based company, and wrote the successful grant to help pay for the $1.5 million project.

Kinziger, explained the new optical sorter is already installed and allowing the company to push more material through its recycling line more quickly. Installation of a new flake sorter should be complete in the coming weeks to help remove any non-PET plastics that make it through the process. The new project also incorporates flake sortation directly into the recycling line for the first time.

"The new grant will help us … increase the collection of PET bottles and thermoforms and allow us to source a lot more locally vs. having to source nationwide. We can bring in a lot more local bales and sort them as well," Kinziger said.

Placon is not only pushing more bottles and thermoform containers through the company's recycling line, but also capturing a higher rate of PET thanks to the improved optical equipment.

Placon currently specs PET bottle bales that commonly contain between 5-10 percent PET thermoforms, Kinziger said in an email. "We are hoping to collect more thermoforms with the new equipment but do not have a number of what that will be as of right now."

Placon received one of five grants the partnership issued in its latest round of funding to promote increased PET recycling.

"It's a really good example of the types of improvements that we'd like to see. We view it as enabling them to be a better steward of the PET that's being collected and sent through the recycling system. They are able to now maximize their utilization of that PET and generate more rPET," said Adam Gendell. He is director of system optimization at the partnership and leads the group's PET Recycling Coalition.

The coalition is in the midst of awarding a series of grants through multiple rounds of funding all aimed at increasing the amount of PET collected and recycled. Funding in this latest round is "just under $1 million," Gendell said, and includes a grant to Merlin Plastics to increase thermoform recycling at the company's Delta, British Columbia, location.

Both Balcones Resources in San Antonio, Texas, and Republic Services Inc. in Conover, N.C., are receiving grants for new optical sorting equipment at their material recovery facilities.

And thermoformer Direct Pack Inc., which received funding during the partnership's initial round of grants announced in January for a project in Mexicali, Mexico, is receiving an additional grant to help pay for the company's new PET recycling facility in Rockingham, N.C.

As for Placon, PET content from bales sourced from Wisconsin material recovery facilities, which take in and sort recyclables collected at the curbside, tends to be lower quality compared with bales sourced from bottle bill states. The new equipment and improved sortation will allow the company to harvest more of the PET that does come through the line from local sources.

Recycling is literally a hit-and-miss process. Material recovery facilities take in material from recycling collection programs that often mix paper, metal, plastics and sometimes glass into the same residential cart. While this system is easier on consumers, it presents more challenges for recyclers. This so-called single-stream commonly leads to cross-contamination of materials between bales of material created by MRFs that are then shipped off to plastics reprocessors. Think high density polyethylene finding its way into PET bales, or vice versa. Or even metals finding their way into plastic bales.

It's kind of a do-the-best-you-can scenario. Perfection, for most MRFs, is not reality. And the entire recycling system, in one way, is based on recyclers' tolerance for contamination and the economic challenges that creates.

For Placon, the company said it can be successful with only a 45-percent PET content in the bales the company brings in for reuse. Other plastics — like HDPE or polypropylene — and other materials, such as aluminum, are sorted out and then resold to other recyclers, Kinziger explained. One company's contamination is another company's treasure.

Bales from outside the region used by Placon can be as much as 80 percent PET, depending on the collection approach. Bottle bill states feature cleaner PET streams because the material is segregated from curbside collection through separate deposit-and-return schemes.

Placon built its own recycling center in 2011, a project that was a bit uncommon for a finished goods maker to undertake. But by bringing the recycling process in house, the company is able to control its recycling efforts.

They say time is a cruel mistress, and this is true in recycling as it is in life.

Some of Placon's recycling equipment is getting a bit long in the tooth, Kinziger said. So updating the optical sortation will have a significant impact on efficiency. "Our process is very closed loop. But our facility is now 12 years old, so the equipment is getting a little outdated," she explained.

"Our existing sorters at the time were just not catching everything and having a lot of issues. The new technology allows us to collect thermoforms at a higher rate, bottles at a higher rate than the original equipment every could," Kinziger said.

Placon uses recycled PET in both its stock and custom-made thermoforms. The company uses both post-consumer material as well as post-industrial PET in the form of skeletons created through Placon's own thermoforming business.

PET flake created by the company is extruded into sheet and then used to create new products, some of which can contain up to 100-percent recycled content. The company's Madison location provides new PET rolls to other company locations in and collects skeletal waste from those sites for reprocessing in Madison.

"This is a really good example of doing more with what we are already collecting," Gendell said about the Placon project. "We hope it's a signal to the PET reclamation community that these types of improvements can move the needle and they carry meaning.

"It's certainly the type of change we'd like to stimulate in our grant program," he said.