It just got easier to recycle plastic in Southern Nevada as Republic Services celebrated the opening of a “first of its kind” recycling facility in North America on the eastern edge of the Las Vegas Valley!
The new $70 million Polymer Center, which lists Coca-Cola as one of its initial partners, can take rigid plastic materials such as water bottles and other plastic consumer goods and recycle the material into other consumer goods, rather than down-cycling the plastic into less sensitive products such as drainage pipes or park benches.
Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability for Republic, says the center allows plastics in consumer goods to stay in service and have a longer life cycle.
“When you’re putting materials into those types of markets, there’s limited application — it’s a drainage pipe, it’s a septic system, it’s some other type of construction material,” he said. “That’s recycling, and that’s all good, good use of that material, it gets a second life. But then, at the end of that material’s life, it’s very difficult to recycle.”
The hope is that the Polymer Center can recycle a plastic bottle up to six or seven times before it would have to be down-cycled, Keller said. The center can produce more than 100 million pounds of recycled plastics per year and can sort plastic by food and non-food use as well as by color, so if a plastic bottle comes in as green, it can be recycled as green!
