Alpek Polyester USA in Pennsylvania set to close

Alpek Polyester USA LLC, a Reading, Pennsylvania-based polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycler and business unit of Mexican firm Alpek S.A.B. de C.V., will close March 15, according to a recent Worker Adjustment and Retraining Nofitication (WARN) filed with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor.

The closing of the 270,000-square-foot plant, located at 4030 Pottsville Pike in Reading, will affect 100 employees. The facility is considered the largest standalone bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in the Americas.

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In 2023, the company told Plastics Recycling, a supplement of Recycling Today, that the facility produces bottle-grade recycled PET (rPET) from bottles collected mostly in New York City, Washington and Baltimore, with most of the resin going back to bottlers in the region.

Alpek said at the time that the facility had 60,000 tons of flake capacity per year and 45,000 tons of pellet capacity per year. All the flake produced at the site goes into the company’s rPET pellets.

The Reading facility was built by CarbonLite Holdings LLC before it was acquired by Dak Americas LLC—now Alpek Polyester USA—for $96 million when CarbonLite declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy during the early stages of commissioning. Alpek has operated the plant since May 2021.

The Reading location is the second rPET producer under Alpek’s umbrella to close in less than a year. In May 2025, the parent company announced the closure of its Alpek Polyester USA LLC location in Cedar Creek, North Carolina, which ceased operations July 31.

The North Carolina facility, also acquired by Alpek in 2001, had an installed capacity of 170,000 tons of PET resin and approximately 35,000 tons of rPET flake production capacity per year.

In November 2024, the parent company announced its subsidiary, Syropek, would cease production at its BVPV Styrenics LLC facility in Monaca, Pennsylvania. The site, which had an installed capacity of 123,000 tons of expanded polystyrene (EPS) per year, was built in the 1940s and was acquired by Alpek in 2020.

Alpek operates 34 plants across nine countries and produces virgin resins such as PET, EPS, polypropylene (PP) and purified terephthalic acid (PTA), along with rPET pellets and flake. Including the Reading facility, the company operates seven facilities in the United States—five of which produce recycled resins.