ORPET facility open for business

ORPET facility open for business

By Editorial Staff, Resource Recycling

"I think it's a unique operation. I don't know of anything like it," says Bruce Sone, in advance of the grand opening of ORPET's facility outside of St. Helens. But according to Sone, getting there required careful planning, stakeholder buy-in and an update to the state's bottle bill [1] to include water bottles and other beverage containers.

"You couldn't have picked a worse time to start this," says Sone, who serves as the company's sales director. Three years ago, Sone was approached about creating a new recycling facility by plastics industry veteran Dennis Denton. The recession was in full swing and signs of recovery had yet to emerge, but a $12 million investment along with an expansion of the state's container deposit system to include plastic bottles, and today, Oregon's very newest PET recycling company is up and running.

"People build plants and then go, whoops," says Sone, explaining how many plants have trouble securing material. "They can't feed the beast."

According to Sone, ORPET, avoids this predicament thanks to a 10-year agreement to buy PET bottles collected through the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, which collects redeemed containers from approximately 3,000 grocery store recycling centers throughout the state. ORPET gets about 17 million pounds annually from the OBRC and the company needs more material to run at full capacity.

Sone says that the expansion of Oregon's bottle bill last year to include plastic bottles established a clean supply of material for the facility and made the project much more feasible. Bales of the material, weighing between 600 and 1,200 pounds, are trucked into the 45,000-square-foot facility that employs 25 people.

ORPET's plant is modeled after a PET recycling operation in Vienna that Sone said he toured several times. German manufacturer S+S Inspection supplied some of the sorting equipment used and B+B Anlagenbau GmbH designed the processing system, which Sone says can process up to 30 million pounds of PET a year.

Clean PET flakes produced at the plant are tested for quality and then sold for use in a variety of applications, including packaging, strapping and other purposes. ORPET is looking into eventually getting an extruder so that it can produce food-grade recycled PET.

Contrary to other media reports the facility will operate under the ORPET name and not under Pacific PET Recycling, which is an affiliated holding company.

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