Unifi Inc., Greensboro, North Carolina, has selected equipment makers AMUT SpA of Italy and Bulk Handling Systems (BHS), Eugene, Oregon, to provide the technology for a $25 million expansion that will increase its capacity recycle PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles into fiber for apparel and automotive products.
The investment is being made at Unifi’s Repreve facility in Reidsville, North Carolina.
Anthony Georges, president of AMUT North America, based in Vaughn, Ontario, says it will design, build and assemble a new PET washing plant. Unifi will use AMUT’s patented dry delabeling system to remove the shrink-sleeve wraps from the postconsumer bottles.
“This is to give them total vertical integration of the process,” Georges says, adding that label removal is an important step in processing bales of municipal PET bottles.
BHS will design, manufacture and install a front-end PET purification system with nine optical sorters by National Recovery Technologies, which is part of the company’s family of businesses. The system also will feature the latest in screens and air-sorting technology.
BHS says the system will process 22,000 pounds of baled materials per hour by removing the non-PET content and preparing the PET for the conversion from bottles to flake.
The flake is used to make Unifi’s Repreve line of polyester yarns and fibers, which go into brands like Haggar, Ford and Quicksilver.
Since 2009, Unifi has recycled more than 4 billion plastic bottles into Repreve-based products. The new bottle processing plant will produce about 75 million pounds of recycled PET materials when it begins operation in June 2016, AMUT says.
“This state-of-the-art facility will raise the bar for Unifi, allowing us to internalize the majority of our flake requirements as we continue to expand our Repreve filament and polymer chip business,” Mark McNeill, Unifi vice president of technology and business development, says.