Nestlé Waters US to boost rPET bottle production with new CarbonLITE agreement

19 Nov 2018 --- Nestlé Waters North America has signed an agreement with rPET supplier CarbonLITE with the latter due to expand its US production by building a third recycling facility in Nestlé Waters’ local bottling region (Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania). The new contract builds upon Nestlé Waters’ existing relationship with CarbonLITE, one of the largest producers of food-grade, post-consumer rPET, and allow the beverage company to further expand use of recycled materials in its packaging. The company currently purchases rPET from CarbonLITE’s existing facilities in California and Texas.

“We are pleased that CarbonLITE will be locating a facility in a region important to our manufacturing footprint,” says Bill Trackim, Vice President, Head of Supply Chain and Procurement at Nestlé Waters North America. “Being able to purchase rPET in the area helps us to better support the regional economy while promoting environmental sustainability through the use of renewable and recyclable materials in our packaging.”

CarbonLITE anticipates the facility will be in full production by early 2020 and will have the ability to recycle over 2 billion post-consumer bottles a year. The new 200,000-square-foot processing facility is anticipated to save 60,000 tons of carbon annually by using post-consumer materials and produce 80 million pounds per year of food-grade rPET pellets.

“Nestlé Waters continues to be a leader in its sustainability efforts,” says Leon Farahnik, Chairman of CarbonLITE Industries, LLC. “We are proud to have grown with them for the past seven years and proud to expand our relationship in our state of the art facility in Pennsylvania.”

Nestlé Waters, which has two bottling facilities in the Lehigh Valley, uses recycled plastic in a number of its brands including Nestlé Pure Life and Deer Park which are bottled locally. The company has been increasing the amount of rPET it uses in its packaging since 2011, and in February 2018, Nestlé Waters launched a 700ml Nestlé Pure Life bottle made of 100 percent rPET. In California, all of the company’s single-serve sizes of Arrowhead Brand Mountain Spring Water and Nestlé Pure Life bottles produced in the state are made with 50 percent rPET.

Nestlé Waters’ parent company, Nestlé SA, is a signatory of the recently announced New Plastics Economy Global Commitment. An initiative of The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and UN Environment, the “Global Commitment” is an agreement to ensure that 100 percent of plastic packaging can be reused, recycled or composted by 2025.

More than 290 organizations comprising 20 percent of all plastic packaging produced globally have signed the “Global Commitment” to eradicate plastic waste at source and establish a circular economy for the material. The New Plastics Economy Global Commitment is led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in collaboration with UN Environment.

Nestlé Waters’ new agreement with CarbonLITE will help the company to reach the six key targets of the “Global Agreement” which are as follows:

• Elimination of problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging through redesign, innovation and new delivery models is a priority.
• Reuse models are applied where relevant, reducing the need for single-use packaging.
• All plastic packaging is 100 percent reusable, recyclable, or compostable.
• All plastic packaging is reused, recycled, or composted in practice.
• The use of plastic is fully decoupled from the consumption of finite resources.
• All plastic packaging is free of hazardous chemicals and the health, safety and rights of all people involved are respected.

In a recent interview with PackagingInsights, Sander Defruyt, Lead of the New Plastics Economy project, explained that “Only businesses and governments can solve the plastic pollution crisis – it’s a race to the top.”