Spring-Water Bottler to Expand In-House PET Recycling

CG Roxane LLC, Novato, Calif., the family-owned and operated supplier of Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water, plans to expand its recently launched PET recycling activities to achieve 100% rPET content for all its bottles. Last November, the company opened a PET recycling facility in San Bernardino, Calif., which takes sorted, clean rPET flakes produced by a partner company from locally sourced, recycled bottles and extrudes them into pellets, which are shipped to CG Roxane’s bottling plants. At those plants, the pellets are injection molded into preforms and then stretch-blow molded into fresh water bottles. The San Bernardino plant has capacity to process about 35 million lb/yr of rPET, equivalent to about 1 billion PET bottles, coming mostly from the greater Los Angeles area.

The San Bernardino plant, described by the company as “the first of its kind to be opened by a U.S. beverage company,” supplies CG Roxane’s two California plants at Mt. Shasta and Olancha, which use the recycled pellets to produce bottles with at least 50% rPET content. CG Roxane has five other bottling plants at water sources in New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas. The company told Plastics Technology that it plans to expand into East Coast rPET production by 2022. The company also states that its production “will soon be 100% rPET nationally in the near future. CG Roxane remains committed to producing our own rPET and upholding our ‘we make it, we take it back’ mentality.”

In addition, the company notes that from its founding in 1990 to 2020, it has reduced the weight of its 500-ml PET bottle by 62% from 21 g to 8 g.