PETpla.net Insider 03 / 2019

BOTTLING / FILLING PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 03/19 www.petpla.net 34 Bottles: recycled, produced, filled and shipped in a real cycle Water filling in 100% rPET On the most northerly part of our tour we met Sandy Gott of Ice River Spring in Feversham, Ontario. She told us the amazing story of her family-owned business which is the only bev- erage company in North America operating their own recycling facility, self-manufacturing their bottles out of 100% recycled post-consumer packaging. Tour Sponsors: As an introduction let me tell you some impressive hard facts: Ice River Spring has six plants for bottle produc- ing and filling and one recycling plant in Canada. In the US there are five manu- facturing plants. Each factory occupies roughly 100,000-600,000 square feet. Here in Feversham, the largest plant, they have six Husky preform machines as well as capping manufacturing equipment from the same company. Two Starlinger lines and a number of Krones machines for bottling, filling and packaging. We also recognised Sidel and IMDvista equipment. Every day they ship around 100 loads from this facility. We asked Sandy about how the idea to create this very successful business came about and the chal- lenges that had to be faced: Sandy and her husband Jamie Gott founded the company in 1995, and two of their three children and other members of the family have also joined the business. Sandy also told us about their second business; they are organic farmers and originally their aim was to protect water sources. “We had a property with clean spring water, so we started sell- ing tanker loads of water from our spring to bottlers in Toronto. Then we thought, why don’t we bottle the water ourselves? So Jamie built our first line in a 5,000 square feet bot- tling plant and it just grew from there.” The business model was easy, as it was focused exclusively on private label business. For the consumer that means having an alternative healthy beverage on the go. And the timing was good: “Here in Feversham we have the largest plant with about 600,000 square feet; there is a 5 km pipeline from our spring to the plant to limit the truck traffic. We expanded first in the West of Canada then in the US. At the moment we have six bot- tling plants in Canada and five in the US. Our recycling facility is located in Shelburne, Ontario. Caps collected from the recycling line are used at our sister company CRP Products to make outdoor furniture. All of our bot- tling plants are zero waste to landfill.” With an annual growth rate of 6-8% in the bottled water industry, especially in the private label sector, Ice River Spring has enjoyed continu- ing growth because consumers are really looking for a healthy beverage option. “This facility was built in 2000 and we added to it every year until completion in 2005. In the first five years of business we doubled our turnover every year. So we decided to build up a network across Canada to cut delivery times and to service the various regions more effectively. We have 800 team members in total and this increases enormously every year. Here we have Husky machines for preform injection, a number of machines for half litre and four litre bottles, 1.5 l bottles and the 15 l bot- tles. To give the complete overview: we have 6 preform machines in total, the Husky Hypet 500-144 cavity, and Hypet 400-96 cavity from Husky. The cap machinery is the Husky 6 Hylec- tric 300-72 cavity and Husky 10 Hyl- ectric 300-96 cavity.” Sandy continues: “We have invested significantly in light weighting our prod- uct. When we started, our bottle weighed in at 20g now it’s 8.5g. It was at this point that we contacted Husky with a view to injecting our own preforms and producing our own bottles, and we also began injecting our own caps. We were sensitive to consumer concern about plastic in landfill and we start to think about what we could do to reduce our carbon footprint?” Ice River Spring tried two differ- ent options: “Initially we went with an aseptic packaging line which was paper based and learned very quickly that this is very difficult to recycle. We also worked with PLA resin but this was incapable of maintaining the integrity of a 2 year shelf life. We then began experimenting with recycled material and started to include it in our products, first 25% than 50%“. F.l.t.r.: Sandy Gott with her husband Jamie Gott, CEO of Ice River Spring and their daughter Crystal Howe, Sustain- ability Manger at Feversham plant Starlinger purification unit at Ice River Spring 5 km pipeline arriving from the source at the plant in Feversham Filling Special