On Tuesday, December 5, Republic Services hosted the grand opening of its Polymer Center in Las Vegas, the first-of-its-kind facility in North America! The new Polymer Center will enable greater plastic circularity and help meet the growing demand for recycled material.
The Polymer Center is expected to produce more than 100 million pounds of recycled plastics each year to be used in sustainable packaging and other applications, creating two different products:
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PET, the material used in water or soda bottles, will be shredded and washed to create a product called rPET flakes. |
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Olefins, the material used in products like milk jugs, detergent containers, or yogurt cups, will be separated by color and type of plastic. Once sorted, these plastics will go to the Blue Polymers facility for purifying and custom blending for our customers to use in sustainable packaging. |
The Polymer Center expects to significantly extend the lifecycle of plastic packaging and help turn plastic bottles into new bottles six to seven times, enabling true circularity and delivering on our promise of Sustainability in Action. A nationwide network of Polymer Centers is under development. The second will open in Indianapolis in late 2024.
