Mexico-headquartered Alpek will shut down its RPET plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, in mid-March, according to a WARN notice filed with the state.
According to the notification, 100 employees will be affected, and the site closure will be effective March 15. The company still has RPET production at its Indiana plant. The Reading plant is the former site of CarbonLite operations.
Last June, Alpek announced it was closing its plant in North Carolina, which included both virgin and RPET production. Alpek is the largest PET producer globally, listing on its site 15 manufacturing locations in nine countries, including the US, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, UK, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
Steve Alexander, CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, told Plastics Recycling News the closure was “yet another unfortunate result” of factors including global overproduction of virgin plastic, imports of inexpensive recycled resin, and the lack of support for the domestic plastics recycling industry, including brands that have backed away from PCR content commitments.
APR owns Resource Recycling, Inc., publisher of Plastics Recycling News.
“You know, we hear a lot about infrastructure, and we have a recycling industry which can produce both volume and quality of material that the market wants, but because there are cheaper alternatives, people are going to go to that,” he said. “And the fact of the matter is that no recycler is going to continue to invest in this without a market.”
He added that the facilities that have closed, including rPlanet Earth and Natura PCR, were all built within the last 15 years. “It’s not like it’s an aging infrastructure or an aging industry.”
At the heart of the recent failures is that the US has provided incentives for renewable energy, such as purchases of electric vehicles and for providing infrastructure to charge them. “And yet, we have a material that reduces the use of fossil fuels, takes less energy to produce, reduces carbon footprint, as well as someone’s global greenhouse gas emissions by using recycled material, and we don’t incentivize the utilization of that.”
As such, Alexander emphasized the need for stakeholders to work together to advance policy initiatives to support the domestic plastics recycling industry, “or there won’t be any.”
