New plastics recycler ReVital Polymers officially opens in Sarnia, Ont.

A new recycler has opened, said to be Canada’s first recycling facility that combines a container recovery facility and a plastics recovery facility in one location.

ReVital Polymers Inc., which was founded last year but officially opened its doors in Sarnia, Ont. on Oct. 20, is owned and operated by two recycling industry pioneers, Emmie Leung, CEO and Tony Moucachen, president. Leung is the founder and CEO of Burlington, Ont.-based Emterra Group, a national leader in waste resources management that annually processes and markets more than 500,000 tonnes of recyclables; Moucachen is the founder and president of Delta, B.C.-based Merlin Plastics Group, a veteran of the North American plastic packaging recycling and remarketing industry. The two formed a partnership in 2016 to acquire the assets of Entropex, a Sarnia plastics recycling facility that had gone into receivership. The assets included an 180,000-square-foot recycling facility where ReVital is now located.

ReVital accepts post-consumer and post-industrial recovered plastics from municipal and industrial, commercial, and institutional recycling programs in Ontario, across Canada and throughout the U.S., and uses a closed loop process to recycle materials into raw materials for use in manufacturing again. “Our proprietary process incorporates state-of-the-art technology that sorts and converts waste plastics into discrete resin types, tailored to specific customer end-use applications,” Moucachen said. “This customized approach ensures ReVital improves recovery rates for end-of-life products and packaging, extends material value and utility through better end-of-life management, and allows manufacturers and retailers to offer new products and packaging that incorporate recycled content.”

ReVital has also developed what Moucachen calls an “innovative, proprietary system” to recover black polyethylene and polypropylene for high-end applications as non-black plastics; target markets for recycled resins include automotive parts and consumer products such as new containers. “This is a real departure from the common practice of using recycled plastic containers to make lower end products such as drain pipes and plastic lumber,” he said.

The company has also broadened the range of plastics recovery in Ontario to include plastic coffee pods. “Taken together, these innovations enhance the value of recovered plastics – upcycling versus downcycling these materials,” Moucachen said.

The company’s goal is to provide a stable, domestic end-market for mixed plastics in North America. “It’s a critical goal, since traditional overseas markets are shrinking in the wake of China’s National Sword announcement, which proposes a ban on imports of 24 categories of recovered waste resources, including the full range of 1 to 7 plastics,” Moucachen said. “We’ve been in operation for under a year, but we already have the capacity to meet the plastics recycling needs of central Canada as well as the entire mid-west of the U.S., bringing recovered resources back to Canada to add value to our recycling industry and the local economy.”

Among the dignitaries on hand to help launch the new facility on Oct. 20 were Arthur Potts, MPP (Beaches-East York) and parliamentary assistant to Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change; Michael Bradley, mayor of the City of Sarnia; Bob Bailey, MPP (Lambton-Sarnia); and Carol Hochu, president and CEO of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association. They were joined by more than 60 guests.