PETpla.net Insider 04 / 2019

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 04/19 www.petpla.net 36 Post-consumer PET recycling in Ohio A safety tightrope walk June 2018, We met Lori Carson, Director Commercial Operations at Phoenix Technologies Running a full capacity of 60-65 million lbs a year and established for 25 years in recycling plants, Lori Carson, Director Commercial Operations, at Phoenix Technologies has gotten to know many of the problems that can crop up in the post-consumer recycling industry. Starting up the plant in the first place that was the big challenge. In 1993 the company was founded as a resin plant producing 5 million lbs of resin, quickly expanded and now has two plants: one sorting, one resin plant with 100 staff. Recycling Special Right from the beginning Phoenix kept in close contact with the sus- tainability department of the city’s government in Wood County, where Lori also sits on the solid waste board. They are the only recycler representatives together with people representing the collection side. The county seat is Bowling Green, where a collection centre is located just across the street from the plant. This is also the drop-off centre for waste collections from surrounding towns, and for other venues such as trade fair waste. According to Lori, the system works well because everyone knows everyone else. “We are con- stantly asking ourselves how we can improve and we try to be good neigh- bours. We work hard to achieve this because it’s the only way to ensure we get good cooperation.” “We still buy clean flake material from the outside. The line is under- capacity for our resin plant, a delib- erate decision, as this enables us to go into the marketplace and buy any special quality we might need. We had some partners to whom we made commitments, and it just made sense to keep relationships with them.” STF is the equipment supplier, and they installed their largest line. Lori told us that they chose STF because they operate their own lines, so they are very much aware of all the challenges that can occur. The sorting equipment is a combination of S+S and Buhler, who were recommended by STF. “We sent our material to Germany, to undergo trials, because US bales are different to European, to make sure the line could process them acceptably.” Market situation In the US, PET and HDPE are the materials which are mainly recy- cled, and Lori sees these streams continuing to grow. For two years, it has been an extremely challenging market: virgin resin has been very competitive economically, pricing has been extremely challenging for recyclers especially in the United States to meet. “The positive to our startup period was learning when raw material pricing was low!” she states. In the US, the recycling rate is very low at 28 or 29%. These rates are reported in cooperation with the APR (Association of post-consumer plastic recycling) and the ACC (Ameri- can Chemistry Council). Lori explained “Every year, the commission carries out a study which collects and com- piles the data from the entire industry, and that’s how we get the recycling rate. It could be slightly off if they don’t have all the recycling data, but the rate has been constant at around the 30% mark for quite a while now.” There is lots of discussion how to get the recycling rates up in the US. In about 8-10 of some of the bigger States, a bottle deposit scheme exists, e.g. New England states, New York, Michigan, Oregon, and Cali- fornia among others have enacted some bottle deposit laws, and Hawaii also has bottle deposit laws. “In those states, the recycling rate is 70%, which just goes to show how awful the average 30% rate really is! That’s where the challenge lies!” Lori pointed out. “It is not the ability to recycle, because we can - there are compa- nies like us in the market, the problem is the collection side, how can we grow more supply?” How to improve collection “30% is used to support the indus- try: the problem with it is economics. If there is not enough material and supply is always limited than it’s about the price. Quality is key objective, but when demand is higher than supply, it’s a lot about price. That makes your recycling resin get out of kilter with the price of virgin material. If the price is too far out, demand begins to shrink as users revert to virgin material.” Lori explained. Big brands, like Coca Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé are trying to work on the supply side. In the US there are industry supported organisa- tions like The Closed Loop Fund and the Recycling Partnership. The idea of these entities is to be able to assist communities, recyclers and others with investment that helps increase by Heike Fischer F.l.t.r.: Heike Fischer, PETplanet and Lori Carson, Director Commercial Oper- ations at Phoenix Technologies Tour Sponsors: