Nestlé Waters North America signs agreement with recycled PET supplier CarbonLite
Nestlé Waters North America announced that it has signed a significant agreement with recycled PET plastic (rPET) supplier CarbonLite, and that CarbonLite will expand its U.S. operations by building a third facility in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania.
The new contract builds upon Nestlé Waters’ existing relationship with CarbonLite, one of the largest producers of food-grade, post-consumer rPET, and allow the beverage company to further expand use of recycled materials in its packaging. The company currently purchases rPET from CarbonLite’s existing facilities in California and Texas.
CarbonLite anticipates the facility will be in full production by early 2020, and will have the ability to recycle over 2 billion post-consumer bottles a year. The new 200,000-square-foot processing facility is anticipated to save 60,000 tons of carbon annually by using post-consumer materials and produce 80 million pounds per year of food-grade rPET pellets.
Nestlé Waters, which has two bottling facilities in the Lehigh Valley, uses recycled plastic in a number of its brands including Nestlé Pure Life and Deer Park which are bottled locally. The company has been increasing the amount of rPET it uses in its packaging since 2011, and in February 2018, Nestlé Waters launched a 700ml Nestlé Pure Life bottle made of 100 percent rPET. In California, all of the company’s single-serve sizes of Arrowhead Brand Mountain Spring Water and Nestlé Pure Life bottles produced in the state are made with 50 percent rPET.
Nestlé Waters’ parent company, Nestlé SA, is a signatory of the recently announced New Plastics Economy Global Commitment. An initiative of The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and UN Environment, the “Global Commitment” is an agreement to ensure that 100 percent of plastic packaging can be reused, recycled or composted by 2025.
