For over a decade, Ice River Sustainable Solutions (IRSS) has been building a business on the circularity of plastics in Ontario, Canada. The company supplies 100% recycled PET bottles to water bottling sister company, Ice River Springs, and IRSS operates a state-of-the-art plastics recycling facility, Blue Mountain Plastics Recycling.
The company receives PET bales from MRFs across North America and places the highest priority on generating as little waste as possible. IRSS even keeps the bottles caps and closures – usually considered by other reclaimers to be a waste stream byproduct – and reclaims them separately to make plastic outdoor furniture.
“The demand for finished recycled plastics continues to outpace the available supply,” said Justin Gott, the company’s VP of Engineering. “We continue to see our recycling operations as a significant growth engine for our company.”
Blue Mountain Plastics already recycles 55 million pounds of PET per year. Now IRSS is expanding their facility to allow 30 million more pounds of PET bales from the U.S. and Canada to be processed annually.
IRSS is tackling a key issue for PET reclaimers: processing commingled loads of PET bottles and non-bottles. Research conducted by The Recycling Partnership has found that while the percentage of non-bottle PET found in bales is increasing to at least 15%, most PET recycling efforts focus only on bottles. IRSS is setting an example by optimizing their operation for the makeup of MRF bales and utilizing as much of the non-bottle PET as possible.
IRSS’s expansion also positions them to be an active buyer of pigmented and opaque PET within the next few years, creating a new end market for a material that often does not make it into recycled products.
The end goal for IRSS is to create new end products with harder-to-recycle forms of PET while continuing to transform other streams of PET into bottles and furniture. With efficiency, creativity, and progressive thinking, IRSS is extracting the greatest value from today’s PET recycling stream, minimizing waste, and providing circularity opportunities for all types of PET packaging.