Dr. Hurley: So, today we're gonna learn about a circular economy in action. You probably heard this word before over and over at different meetings, but today we're actually gonna get to see it live. Materials that we recycle into the waste stream, how they move from being prepared and washed out and ending up at a facility like Verdeco here, who can take these recycled materials and turn them into new materials that could be used to make all different types of new packaging.
Dr. Hurley: So, somebody buys a beverage in a bottle, they recycle that, and it is ground up into a flake, it's cleaned, and then you buy it. How does that become a brand new bottle again?
Tony Efros: Very simple. I'm buying those grinded bottles called as flakes, preferably in a clear shape, we're processing it in our lines, we're going through the contaminations of the product until we get a finished product in a pellet form. And that's what goes back to the market to create those preforms and bottles.
Dr. Hurley: What do you do if the flake, once you receive it—what processes do you go through to make sure that this is good enough to become the next bottle?
Tony Efros: So, in our lab, we are testing every bag that we are receiving here. We are receiving and testing for color, for contaminations. We're checking the quality of their wash process. When it passes all of our inspections, then it's good to go into our production.
Dr. Hurley: What type of contaminants do you see and why are these bad?
Tony Efros: So the main one lately is PVC. PVC creates a lot of, when it goes through the heat of the process, it generates more benzene and those are not good to go into food-grade applications.
Dr. Kevin Yuan: Benzene is considered as hazard material, so we need to develop something to dramatically reduce benzene level for certain applications, especially for water and food container applications. We do have groundbreaking technology by adding additives to significantly reduce benzene level in the rPET. We add additives during extrusion process. So, we have site-feeder or we do pre-blending, and then we go through extruder to make pellets.
Dr. Hurley: We have additives for, you know, mitigating certain chemicals. We have additives for increasing the stability of the bottles, including color. When you add these things into PET, does this affect its ability to be recycled again?
Dr. Kevin Yuan: Some of them do, some of them don't. For example, when we add additives we do need to make sure that we use FDA approved additives so that we can use it for FDA approved applications. We also need to make sure we can reuse, recycle the material. So we purposely very much focus on additives that can be recycled, mostly PET recycled stream. Definitely, we are very much focused on that type of additives.
Dr. Hurley: After the flake is in and you've tested it for contaminants, what happens to it next?
Tony Efros: After we approve the flake, we are taking it into our extrusion system. From there, it goes to additional step of decontaminations from our solid state reactors where it's improved the contamination levels and it's improved the viscosity of the product. And from there, it will go back out into a pellet form.
Dr. Hurley: If I'm a company and I'm producing a PET packaging application and I want to integrate recycled content into my product, you know, how do I start?
Tony Efros: I would recommend to start with 20, 25%. If it's a new customer or a new application that you are trying to incentivize to use recycled product, I would start with 20 or 25%. Adjust your processes, adjust your production, and grow as needed.
Dr. Hurley: What are common pitfalls that you see or maybe issues in adding, you know, recycled content or increasing that content? Do you see any things that companies may struggle with in order to, you know, accomplish that goal?
Dr. Kevin Yuan: Yeah, the major problem is price—price is much higher than virgin PET, that's for sure. Second is people think recycled material is not good enough. So, we need to make sure that they understand the process that we currently have and the product we generate from our current process can meet their needs. They need to understand our rPET much better than today.
Our process is considered as FDA approved. Also, it's been approved from Europe as well. So the process is very consistent. Product is also consistent. We are also making sure that the product we are developing is also compliant with all the requirements from FDA.
Dr. Hurley: Why should we spend more to have a recycled PET bottle?
Tony Efros: We all know the benefits of recycling in general and PET is the same. We want to save our landfill. We want to save our oceans. If we always continue to produce virgin form PET, we will end up with way too much waste in this world. So, our mission is: collect those bottles, recycle them, and create a circular economy where we are using the same plastic over and over again and not throwing it into the ocean.
The biggest challenge I think in the US is the very low single digits percentage of collection rates. We've seen other parts of the world, the collection rates are much higher than in the US. By far, number one challenge that we have—we need to collect more bottles in the US so we can recycle more. We have the capacity, we need more bottles.
Dr. Hurley: It's been a real honor to be able to tour your facility here at Verdeco. It's incredible to be able to see how in one facility you can bring in waste and output new products and be able to test everything. And even in an innovation center, to be able to create brand new products for companies is something completely unique—and right here in the state of South Carolina.
Nick Riedl: Thank you to the team at Verdeco for taking the time to sit down with us. If you'd like to learn more about Verdeco or the work that they're doing, visit them online at verdecorecycling.com.
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