Construction is underway on a massive Los Angeles-area plastics recycling facility that will take in bales of PET bottles from curbside collection and other channels. The rPlanet Earth facility will produce recycled-content products used to make bottles and food packaging.
The 302,000-square-foot facility in Vernon, Calif. is unique for its scale and vertical integration, producing bottle preforms, sheet and thermoform packaging, rather than flakes and pellets for sale.
The company’s co-CEOs say the plant will incorporate advanced technologies that will allow it to skip a common step in the plastics recycling process. Instead of melting plastic to create pellets that are then sold for molding into packaging, the facility will melt and mold processed flakes directly into its end products.
Plastics Recycling Update, sister publication to Resource Recycling, has more details on the development.
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