Canadian Bottled Water Supplier Plans PET Recycling Facility

Ice River Springs, based in Feversham, Ontario, has announced plans to proceed with the construction of its own PET Recycling plant.  When complete, Ice River says that the facility will be capable of producing 100 percent recycled PET water bottles.

“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”, says 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 from baled post consumer plastic purchased from Municipal Recycling Centers.”

The company notes that when completed, the facility will be the first food-grade recycled PET manufacturing facility in Canada. Further, when complete Ice River will be the first North American bottled water company to self manufacture its own resin.

The project involves securing an industrial building in Shelburne, Ontario, as well as purchasing specialized plastics processing equipment.

Ice Rivers’ goal is to produce enough food -grade RPET to sustain the company’s needs as well as other customers.

“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,” Gott says.

“For the purification process we selected Starlinger. The 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 molding 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. The two companies already have teamed-up to recycle PET post-consumer bottles in France.