Category: Recycling
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.”
ICE RIVER SPRINGS WATER CO. INC. Press release.
Ice River Springs of Feversham, Ontario, Canada announced today their plans to proceed with their own PET Recycling plant to produce their 100% recycled PET water bottle, giving Ontario a World Class facility and closing the loop for recycling in North America.
“We believe this to be a great step in our sustainability program and provides our consumers with an environmentally friendly option in their bottled water”, stated Jamie Gott, President and co-founder of ICE RIVER SPRINGS. “Our goal is to eliminate our dependency upon foreign virgin PET resin by self-manufacturing recycled resin (RPET) from baled post consumer plastic purchased from Municipal Recycling Centres.”
Ice River Springs is a leading North American bottled water company with manufacturing plants in eight locations throughout Canada and the US. This will be the first Food-Grade RPET manufacturing facility in Canada, diversifying Ice Rivers’ market by self manufacturing their resin needs for beverage production and also selling food grade RPET resin to other food and beverage companies for various types of packaging. Using 100% RPET for beverage bottles is highly innovative. Ice River will be the first bottled water company in North America to self manufacture its’ resin.
The project involves securing an industrial building in Shelburne, ON and the purchase of specialized plastics processing equipment. The equipment cleans the Blue Box materials, purifies and converts the plastic back into a food grade product that can be used in all beverage and food applications that currently use new (Virgin) PET. The Ice River Springs Group has many years of plastics injection and blow molding experience and has a highly qualified team of technicians well-versed in all aspects of the project requirements. Currently, in addition to bottling water, IRS exports pre-forms (test-tube like vials which are subsequently blown into bottles) to a major North American soft drink manufacturer in the US. Converting these performs to RPET will substantially increase sales and market share for these exports. The long term plan includes over 60 new full time employees supporting this exciting Green Industry
Ice Rivers’ goal is to produce enough food -grade recycled plastic bottle (RPET) to sustain the company’s needs as well as other customers. This commitment to the environment and consumers will result in a plastic water bottle that is made of 100% RPET with the lowest weight of plastic required, the lightest cap, a small label, a tray made out of recycled material, and a biodegradable shrink film. It will be a ‘green’ alternative for consumers and an environmental breakthrough leading to a substantive reduction in the carbon footprint of packaging in this important consumer products sector.
Since 2000, Ice River Springs has decreased the amount of plastic in their bottle by approximately 40% and their cap by 300%. It leads the beverage industry with one of the lightest weight 500mL bottles in North America. Ice River has reduced its’ carbon footprint by the use of tri-axle trailers, high efficiency lighting, geothermal chilling, high and low pressure air recovery and the use of alternative energy. The proposed IRS location in Shelburne is critical to the reduction in carbon footprint as it is located on the shipping lane from the Ice River Springs location in Feversham and the raw materials can be back-hauled on trucks that would normally come back empty.
In short, this project is driven by a business and environmental ethos that seeks to reduce the carbon footprint for Ice River Springs by closing the loop for plastics, reducing the demand for oil and re-processing a commodity (post consumer PET) that is currently either being shipped overseas or being used in North America for single use products like clothing, furniture or automotive applications.
This project will allow Ice River Springs to be the first major water bottler in North America to use a water bottle made of fully recycled plastic. Recycled food grade PET (RPET) can produce over 20 successful generations of water bottles.
There are multiple environmental advantages to this. Ice River Springs would no longer need to purchase virgin PET resin, reducing the overall demand for oil. Secondly, the recycling process uses much less energy than producing virgin PET from fossil fuels. In addition, since most of the virgin plastic resins come from Asia, it will reduce transportation requirements and fossil fuel emissions. Consequently, Ontario recyclers would no longer need to sell their baled PET bottles to Asia, further reducing transportation emissions. Finally, purchases of PET baled plastic on this scale in Ontario will provide a stable demand for baled post consumer plastic, stabilizing prices, making recycling centers more economically feasible and helping to promote recycling and keep plastic bottles out of landfills.
Jamie Gott, President said, “we evaluated several manufacturers of this technology for both the sorting and cleaning of the post-consumer PET bottles as well as the purification of the clean r-PET materials. The choice for the washing was AMUT; their technology had proved to be extremely cost effective and utilized a minimum amount of water, chemicals and energy, in the cleaning process.
For the purification process we selected STARLINGER. The SSP (Solid State Poly-condensation) technology, for the purification of the flakes is excellent and demonstrates excellent attention to minimizing energy costs to convert the clean r-PET flakes from the AMUT washing line in to high quality PET pellets, which are then utilized in our injection moulding machinery to make the PREFORMS for our new water bottles. The combination of the STARLINGER & AMUT systems will be the first of its kind in operation in North America. They have successfully teamed-up to recycle PET post-consumer bottles in France already. As such, we are very confident that our recycling plant we be a benefit to all, encouraging more recycling in North America.”
This is the first combined plant for these equipment manufacturers in North America although the same two companies worked together in France to recycle post-consumer bottles. Anthony Georges, of AMUT stated: “Being a person who grew up in Ontario and has been involved in environmental movement for decades and plastics recycling for years we are extremely excited about being selected as a key technological & machinery partner. What excites me most is the opportunity to create a totally “CLOSED-LOOP RECYCLING” solution for Ontario, working with Ice River Springs; a respected and leading supplier of high quality bottled water to many throughout North America”.
Breaking the Ice
Canada’s largest private bottled-water company scales back its environmental footprint with a new aseptic packaging line.
To say that the bottled-water industry has a public image problem these days—being continually berated for wasting the planet’s most precious finite resource and littering the landscape with empty plastic bottles—is tantamount to stating the obvious.
But not much more obvious, perhaps, than saying that the industry would not be living through such as public relations nightmare if more of its main players approached their business with the sort of progressive and proactive mindset displayed by the likes of Ice River Springs Water Company Inc. of Feversham, Ont.
It’s Your Health (IYH) has produced a new article on The Safety of Bottled Water.
There has been an increase in the Canadian consumption of bottled water in recent years. Illness caused by bottled water is very rare in Canada, because the water is treated, disinfected, and monitored to make sure it does not contain harmful microorganisms or chemicals. However, to maintain the safety of bottled water, you must also handle and store it properly.
Plastictoday.com
Ice River Springs adds cap molding, recycling
Chicago—Water bottler Ice River Springs (Feversham, ON) continues its vertical integration, with plans to add injection molding of closures and in-plant recycling in the next year. Sandy Gott, VP of corporate affairs, who runs the business with her husband, announced the plans during Pack Expo (Nov. 9-13; McCormick Place; Chicago). Ice River Springs’ main plant, which covers 600,000 sq ft, will add cap molding with a Husky machine in January, and in-plant polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling with a Krones system next year.
Posted June 27, 2011
TORONTO (June 27, 2:05 p.m. ET) – The founders of Ice River Springs Water Co. have invested in their own blow molding operations to simplify production, built bottling and molding plants near their customers to cut on transportation costs and even changed the types of trucks they use to fit more bottles on each load.
So when the Feversham, Ontario-based company decided to use post-consumer recycled PET in its bottles, Ryan L’Abbé said he was not surprised that the owners made the investment needed to do its own recycling in-house.
At Ice River’s new recycling plant in Shelburne, Ontario – its Blue Mountain Plastics division – the company brings in six to seven truckloads of post-consumer plastics daily, collected from municipal collection sites in Ontario, Michigan and New York.
It is an ideal closed-loop system, said L’Abbé, vice president and general manager of Blue Mountain Plastics. Not only does the company wash, sort and repelletize PET – it also ships the material to Ice River’s in-house plant that injection molds preforms, and it delivers its filled bottles in the same trucks that bring post-consumer PET to its recycling plant.
“We can do this all in a week, from collection to molding to shipping,” L’Abbé said during a discussion on recycling at the Wal-Mart Sustainable Packaging Conference June 22 in Toronto as part of PackEx Toronto.
Blue Mountain’s investment in using recycled content won it the Plastics Stewardship Award from the Canadian Plastics Industry Association’s 2011 Plastics Industry Awards, presented during PackEx.
The firm is the first bottled water company in North America to self-manufacture its own resin from recycled content and deliver 100 percent recycled PET bottles, CPIA said.
CPIA gave its Leader of the Year award to Mark Badger, CEO of Switchable Solutions Inc. of Kingston, Ontario. Badger is also former president and CEO of CPIA. The award recognizes individuals who have made important contributions to the Canadian plastics industry.
Switchable Solutions is a start-up that uses an environmentally-friendly solvent to reclaim and recycle plastics as well as process oil sands.
The Plastics Innovation Award went to Ipex Inc. of Toronto, the designer and manufacturer of Bionax, a line of integrated thermoplastic piping systems.
The group’s first Recycled Plastic Products Awards recognizes companies whose products or packaging is made in Canada and contains at least 20 percent recycled plastics. CPIA honored three firms for 2011: