Germany-based Revalyu Resources is investing USD50 million to build its first polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle recycling plant in the United States, said Plasticstoday.
The chemical recycling site will be in Statesboro, GA. “Groundbreaking for the first plant will be June 2023 and commissioning [in] Q3, 2024,” Vivek Tandon, revalyu’s founder, tells PlasticsToday. The 43-acre Statesboro facility will employ about 70 people.
Initially, the Georgia plant is expected to recycle and process more than 12 million PET bottles per day, transforming 225,000 pounds of PET waste into sustainable PET esters and recycled PET (rPET) chips. The company plans to ramp up to a recycling capacity of 450,000 pounds of PET per day at the new plant.
The new US facility will bring revalyu, which also has a PET chemical recycling plant in Nashik, India, closer to its target of recycling more than 2 million pounds of used PET bottles per day by 2026. Revalyu’s glycolysis cehmical recycling process uses 91% less energy and 67% less water than conventional PET recycling.
The company’s chemical recycling technology uses low-temperature glycolysis to depolymerize post-consumer PET bottles into monomers. The monomers are then filtered to remove all impurities before being repolymerized.
A low temperature ensures the integrity of molecular bonds during depolymerization and lowers energy use and cost vs. high-temperature depolymerization. According to revalyu, its recycling process uses 91% less energy and 67% less water than conventional PET recycling.
In addition, revalyu uses mono-ethylene glycol (MEG), which is one of the two components of polyester, as a solvent. Thus, the process includes no chemicals foreign or toxic to polyester.
The result of revalyu’s recycling process is very pure, sustainable PET that can used to directly replace PET produced from petrochemicals. The quality of the rPET is quality equivalent to that of virgin PET.
The rPET chips from revalyu can be used to make new food and nonfood bottles, clothing, fotwear, carpeting, soft furnishings, car seat belts, and in other textile applications.
We remind, after a construction time of nine months and investment of around 7.5 million euros, Austrian plastics manufacturer and recycler Alpla, together with its partners Ecohelp SRL (Romania) and United Polymer Trading AG (Switzerland), have started production at their joint recycling plant in Targu Mures, Romania. The plant, located adjacent to the existing Ecohelp site in Targu Mures, has an annual capacity of around 18,000 tonnes of post-consumer-recycled PET (rPET) per year and aims to supply the southeast European market with food-grade rPET. The project has led to the creation of around 20 new jobs. The joint venture partners will host the official opening ceremony on 4 May 2023.
mrchub.com