Polymer Center Drives Bottle-to-Bottle Circularity

The National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA) honored Republic Services with the 2024 Sustainability Game Changer Award, for the company’s eight-month-old Polymer Center in Las Vegas.

The 71,000-square-foot Polymer Center, Republic’s first in a planned national network of centers, processes baled plastics from materials recovery facilities into recycled PET (rPET) flake and color-sorted high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP).

Incoming post-consumer materials include plastic bottles, jugs, and containers collected from homes and businesses. The Las Vegas Polymer Center has the capacity to produce more than 100 million pounds of recycled plastics per year.

The Las Vegas center uses 17 optical sorters, including near-infrared and medium-infrared optical equipment, to process up to 10 tons of plastics per hour.

The Polymer Center’s recycled plastics can be made into new packaging, as well as other products, demonstrating true circularity. According to Republic Services, the Polymer Center can turn plastic bottles into new bottles six or seven times.

“While some of our products, like cap and closure flake, can be used in other plastic products [besides packaging], our goal is to keep the bulk of our recovered resins in the circular economy for the long term,” says Pete Keller, VP, recycling and sustainability, at Republic Services.

“Packaging manufacturers have set ambitious targets to use more recycled content in their packaging, and our national network of Polymer Centers will help them meet those targets,” he adds.

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Blue Polymers’ role in plastic circularity.

Republic is currently constructing a second Polymer Center, in Indianapolis. Construction of that site, which will also house a Blue Polymers polymer-production facility, is expected to be completed later this year. The Indianapolis facility will comprise two buildings with a total of roughly 286,000 square feet.

Blue Polymers is a joint venture of Republic Services and Ravago, a polymer recycling and distribution company. Blue Polymers will further process plastics from the Polymer Centers to create 100% post-consumer recycled HDPE and PP pellets for use in food-grade and non-food-grade applications.

Blue Polymers made a well-received public debut during NPE2024.

Additional Polymer Centers will be added over time, creating a regional hub-and-spoke network. One of those facilities is planned for Buckeye, AZ, in Q3 2025, and another to follow in the eastern US. Through this nationwide network, local recycling facilities will supply sorted PET, HDPE, and PP to a regional Polymer Center for secondary sortation.

In building out its network, Republic Services is creating a process for managing and processing the plastics stream from end to end, starting with curbside collection of post-consumer plastics and ending with production of high-quality recycled plastic to be used in new packaging.

For now, color-sorted HDPE and PP are shipped “whole” from the Las Vegas Polymer Center, Keller says. “Soon we will be moving these products to our Blue Polymers joint venture for custom blending and extrusion to create drop-in pellet solutions for packaging manufacturers.”

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Supplying Coca-Cola with rPET.

Customers of the Las Vegas Polymer Center include Coca-Cola and Circularix, which produces food-grade post-consumer rPET pellets.

Coca-Cola is using the rPET it purchases from the center to produce new beverage bottles. The company has a sustainability goal of using at least 50% recycled material in its packaging by 2030.

In July 2024 alone, the Las Vegas Polymer Center “shipped 500,000 pounds of rPET flake to Coke to use for new bottles,” Keller says.

Circularix announced its rPET supply agreement with Republic Services in January 2024. Circularix’s first plant, in Hatfield, PA, opened in early 2023; a second plant will start operations this year in Ocala, FL. The 100,000-square-foot Hatfield plant has the capacity to produce 55 million pounds of rPET pellets annually.