Coca-Cola Readies for Second Phase of PET Recycling Project

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--NURRC LLC (Spartanburg, North Carolina) is a joint venture between United Resource Recovery Corporation (URCC) (Spartanburg) and The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO) (Atlanta, Georgia). NURRC was formed in 2007 to build the largest PET bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in the world.

Coca-Cola set the goal to increase the recycled content of its PET bottles to 10% in 2010 and to 25% by 2015. Using URRC's hybrid unPET process, which chemically cleans recycled PET to produce food-grade PET chip, this goal was made more feasible.

The first major construction project of the newly formed joint venture was to build a pilot plant capable of producing 12 million pounds per year of recycled PET chip from discarded plastic bottles in order to prove and further refine the process. Following this was construction of the first phase of a two-phase plan, which was capable of producing 44 million pounds per year of food-grade recycled PET chip. This was completed in 2009. The pilot plant and the first-phase of the production plant can take care of Coca-Cola's recycling needs until Coke phases in higher recycled PET content into their packaging processes. The second phase of the two-phase plan requires that another 44 million-pound-per-year plant be built.

At present, the second-phase recycled PET production plant is in the detailed engineering stage. NURRC is working with an engineering contractor to prepare bid documents. The project is tentatively scheduled to be completed in the first quarter of 2011. Once the project is complete, the total capacity of the Spartanburg plant will be 100 million pounds per year of food-grade recycled PET that can be used to make new bottles and food containers.

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