Our progress in recycling...
Recycling output:
The total volume of plastics that rPlanet Earth recycled this year (output from the facility) was 6,784 metric tonnes (MT). This is a slight decrease from the previous year due to business interruptions caused by the Covid 19 pandemic along with significant downtime incurred for equipment upgrades. However, despite the set-backs, rPlanet Earth is still confidently making progress towards our 2025 recycling target of 40,000 MT of recycled output from our facility of 100% post-consumer material.
Our advancments:
Recycled PET quality
rPlanet Earth continuously strives for improvement and innovation in our recycling processes. We do this to produce the highest quality recycled PET plastic for our broad range of packaging solutions. To ensure all of our recycled content products meet food contact requirements, we process our plastic through a strict sorting, washing and decontamination process with a myriad of quality control points.
With the quality of recycled plastic being essential at rPlanet Earth, we have made considerable investments in our recycling development.
Most notably, over the past year we have made additional capital improvements in our front-end (sorting, label elutriation) and manufacturing (extruded sheet, thermoforms and preform) production cells. These investments were made thoughtfully to improve the quality of throughput through the plant and, ultimately, the quality of our rPET finished goods. Due to these quality-enhancing processes, we can produce packaging and other products that contain 100% post-consumer recycled content for historically difficult rPET applications such as carbonated soft drinks.
Utilization of Curb-side bales
rPlanet Earth continues to utilize curb-side bales as our primary source of recycled material, with over 99% of the recycled plastic intake in 2020 coming from curbside recycling schemes across California. The majority of PET recyclers in California utilize bales containing deposit bottles redeemed through collection schemes, meaning that if it wasn’t for rPlanet Earth these B-grade bales would most likely be down-cycled into lower-quality applications, end up in landfills, be incinerated, or otherwise misused. To work towards a circular economy for PET plastics and a future of zero plastic waste on our planet Earth, we felt it was important to develop systems and processes that are robust enough to process the more challenging curbside material.
Exceeding FDA requirements
At rPlanet Earth, our recycling process removes dirt, labels, glues, volatile organic compounds and other contaminants which enables us to produce packaging products that exceed the FDA’s requirements for direct food contact applications. To ensure these quality standards continually improve, we have increased our investment into sortation and label elutriation technology for ensuring high quality clean / washed flake being processed through our decontamination equipment. We continue to work co-operatively with material reclamation facilities to find solutions to for increasing output yield for curbside bales.
Future growth
By 2025 we plan to double our capacity at our current Vernon location and establish 1 or more new high volume, vertically integrated rPET recycling / rPET packaging product production plants across the USA.
Our progress in sustainable production...
The numbers:
The total volume of recycled plastic packaging produced at rPlanet Earth during the last year was 5,981 metric tonnes (MT). This volume was a 44% increase over last year’s packaging output. In 2020, rPlanet Earth extended its commercial offerings of roll stock sheet and thermoform products (including our EnviroCup line) to the wider market resulting in the increased rPET usage. rPlanet Earth also continued to produce and offer rPET preforms. As rPlanet Earth actively encourages our customers to use post-consumer material in their packaging, we can proudly say that an average of 90% of the packaging we produced came from post-consumer PET sources in 2020.
Our advancments:
100% recyclable and up to 100% post-consumer content!
The idea of the circular economy for plastic packaging is the starting point for all packaging produced at rPlanet Earth. This ideology means that we pride ourselves on providing packaging that is 100% recyclable by design and contains up to 100% post-consumer PET content.
All of our products are recyclable in standard North American deposit (preforms and thus bottles) and curbside (thermoform packaging) recycling scenarios.
We ensure this recyclability on all products to ensure every piece of packaging we produce can re-enter the circular economy without going to waste. Moreover, rPlanet Earth does not produce any unnecessary or problematic packaging, again re-enforcing the recycling process and thereby the circular economy for plastics.
Through sizeable investment and continuous innovation, we can create packages that have superior color/clarity, that surpasses food-grade standards, and is made from 100% post-consumer sourced plastic, collected from curbside recycling schemes across California.
Encouraging the use of post-consumer material and the circular economy
For many of our customers, rPlanet Earth is a make-to-order manufacturer. Having a make-to-order structure means that ultimately the brands/ our customers are the ones that determine the post-consumer content levels in their custom manufactured packaging. So, although we can produce packaging that contains 100% post-consumer content, some customers for preference or other reasons (such as very low virgin PET prices resulting from COVID-19) may request to have some virgin content. In our engagement with consumer brands, we are actively working to ensure all of their packaging is 100% recyclable and contains a high percentage of post-consumer material. It’s our objective to ensure that by switching to high content rPET packaging, they do not sacrifice on quality, both in aesthetics and packaging performance. We encourage our customers to be part of the solution by creating a market for post-consumer recycled PET by utilizing rPET products in their packaging portfolio. We reinforce this as being a responsible choice for their business by producing high-quality material with exceptional color/clarity at a reasonable market price.
Utilization of previously landfilled plastic streams
rPlanet Earth continues to make progress in terms of utilization of previously landfilled, post-consumer plastic streams via the introduction of thermoformed post-consumer content in our EnviroCup and EnviroPET product lines.
To further these efforts, rPlanet Earth is working to source and increase the supply of post-consumer thermoformed bales and flake, which currently almost all end up in landfills. To combat this issue, rPlanet Earth is a member of an advocacy group organized by the Foodservice Packaging Institute to better understand the thermoform recycling stream and define the most cost-effective and practical pathways for recovering it. rPlanet Earth continues to work with industry partners in pushing for legislative solutions for increasing feedstock potential for thermoform recycling and creating markets to ensure this valuable material is collected, recycled, and re-used in consumer packaging products