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Solid gains in bottle-to-bottle recycling

Closed-loop, bottle-to-bottle recycling is taking a big leap forward in a Canadian town called Shelburne, some 60 miles north of Toronto.

That’s where Ice River Springs, a bottled water company headquartered in Feversham, Ontario, is converting an industrial building into a PET recycling plant. This makes Ice River Springs the first bottled water company in North America to self-manufacture its own resin.

“Our goal,” says Ice River Springs president Jamie Gott, “is to eliminate our dependency upon foreign virgin PET resin by self-manufacturing recycled resin from baled post-consumer plastic purchased from Municipal Recycling Centres.”

Some pretty specialized equipment is required to purify and flake the PET that comes in from Canada’s Blue Box system. Equally specialized is the gear that converts the flake back into a food-grade product that can take the place of virgin PET. Ice River Springs is betting on AMUT S.p.A. for the sorting, cleaning, and flaking part of this process and Starlinger for the purification of the clean rPET material. According to Gott, the AMUT system was judged most cost-effective and used a minimum amount of water, chemicals, and energy. Starlinger, he adds, has a Solid State Poly-condensation technology that effectively purifies PET flake and keeps energy consumption and cost to a minimum. The Starlinger system converts flake to PET pellets, which are then used to injection-mold preforms for the next generation of water bottles.

In addition to bottling its own water under its own brand, Ice River Springs also sells preforms to a major North American soft drink manufacturer in the U.S. Should that soft drink manufacturer convert to rPET preforms, the number of PET bottles made from 100% rPET would rise considerably. No wonder Ice River Springs’ long-term plan includes more than 60 new full-time employees supporting the new initiative.

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