US recycler and food-grade rPET manufacturer Evergreen (Clyde, Ohio; www.evergreentogether.com) is set to receive a USD 5m (EUR 4.2m) investment from a partnership between the American Beverage Association (Washington, D.C.; www.americanbeverage.org), Ohio Beverage Association (Columbus, Ohio; www.ohiobeverage.com) and investment firm Closed Loop Partners (New York, New York; www.closedlooppartners.com) to expand its bottle-to-bottle plastics recycling operations.

The investment is part of a USD 22m (EUR 18.8m) project to expand a facility and services at Evergreen, which in 2020 collected and recycled 1 bn post-consumer PET bottles to make more than 18,000 t of recycled PET. Evergreen expects to collect 2 bn post-consumer PET bottles every year and double its rPET manufacturing capacity to more than 36,000 t when the project is completed, by mid-2022.

The investment will help finance construction of a 5,000 m² building at the company’s PET recycling facility in Ohio along with the installation of a new high-volume food-grade rPET manufacturing line. Two existing rPET repelletising lines within an existing 22,110 m² building at the site will be retrofitted with solid-state polycondensation reactors to meet FDA specifications for food-grade rPET. Evergreen also operates a 20,400 m² PET bottle recycling and rPET processing facility in Riverside, California.

Closed Loop Partners is part of a national effort spurring investments that improve bottle-to-bottle collection and recycling under the “Every Bottle Back” initiative started by beverage giants Coca-Cola, Keurig Dr Pepper and PepsiCo.

Among others, the US investment firm manages the Circular Plastics Fund, created by Dow, LyondellBasell and Nova Chemicals to advance the recycling of polyolefins in North America (see Plasteurope.com of 31.05.2021).