Transcript:
Hi, my name’s Pete Keller. I’m Vice President of Recycling & Sustainability for Republic Services, and we’re standing in the Indianapolis Polymer Center. The Polymer Center is a secondary plastic sortation facility. It receives rigid plastic material from recycling facilities throughout the Midwest, primarily PET or number one, resins and polyolefins. And the intent of the Polymer Center is to produce drop-in material, feedstocks for consumer packaging, and it's 100% post-consumer curbside-collected material. So the investment here in Indianapolis is made to enable greater circularity and specifically greater package circularity. So today a lot of our materials are downcycled into things like carpet, clothing, construction materials, and what Polymer Center enables is those materials to be returned directly into that packaging value chain and ultimately be captured over and over again. So Republic’s really excited about the investment here in the Midwest about being able to bring greater amounts of recycled content to the marketplace and providing materials that can go directly back into packaging.
Background:
Republic Services and Blue Polymers have opened a co-located Polymer Center and plastics recycling facility in Indianapolis, designed to convert post-consumer plastic packaging into high-quality recycled PET flake and HDPE and PP resins for reuse in new packaging. The 300,000-sq-ft complex processes materials collected from Rebulic’s regional MRF operations and uses advanced sortation, washing, and compounding systems to produce PET flake and polyolefin resins that meet the needs of packaging manufacturers. The facility is part of Republic’s national network aimed at improving plastics circularity and increasing the availability of recycled content for packaging applications.
Read the full article, “Indy Goes Circular: Republic Services Opens Plastics Recycling Complex”
