Nestlé Waters signs agreement with recycled PET supplier CarbonLITE

Drink supplier Nestlé Waters North America has signed what it calls a “significant agreement” with recycled PET (rPET) supplier CarbonLITE that will allow Nestlé Waters to further expand the use of recycled materials in its packaging.

The agreement also calls for CarbonLITE to expand its U.S. operations by building a facility in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania. This will be CarbonLITE’s third facility in the U.S.

Nestlé Waters currently purchases rPET from CarbonLITE’s existing two facilities in California and Texas. Headquartered in Los Angeles, CarbonLITE is one of the largest producers of food-grade, post-consumer rPET.

“We are pleased that CarbonLITE will be locating a facility in a region important to our manufacturing footprint,” said Bill Trackim, vice president, head of supply chain and procurement at Nestlé Waters North America. “Being able to purchase rPET in the area helps us better support the regional economy while promoting environmental sustainability through the use of renewable and recyclable materials in our packaging.”

CarbonLITE expects the facility to be in full production by early 2020, and it will have the ability to recycle more than two billion post-consumer bottles a year. The new 200,000-square-foot processing facility is anticipated to save 60,000 tons of carbon annually by using post-consumer materials and produce 80 million pounds per year of food-grade rPET pellets.

Nestlé Waters, which has two bottling facilities in the Lehigh Valley, uses recycled plastic in a number of its brands including Nestlé Pure Life and Deer Park, which are bottled locally. The company has been increasing the amount of rPET it uses in its packaging since 2011; in February 2018, Nestlé Waters launched a 700-ml Nestlé Pure Life bottle made of 100 per cent rPET. In California, all of the company’s single-serve sizes of Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water and Nestlé Pure Life bottles produced in the state are made with 50 per cent rPET.