Ice River Sustainable Solutions is a Canadian family-owned company committed to bottling natural spring water, with a focus on sustainability and recycling PET plastic.
Since 2010 the company runs its recycling facility ‘Blue Mountain Plastics Recycling’ to produce food grade resin from plastic bottles on two bottle-to-bottle lines by Starlinger. “We are the first beverage company in North America to build and operate our own recycling facility in a closed loop”, states Sandy Gott, Executive Vice President and Co-Owner at Ice River Sustainable Solutions, and adds “We are still the only beverage company in North America doing so today.” Ice River has the capacity to recycle 110 million pounds (25,000 tonnes) of PET plastic per year. They get the bottles back for recycling from the consumers via curbside collection, such as the Canadian “blue box” and recycle these into new rPET bottles.
Fully committed to sustainability and recycling, the company seeks new solutions to design, produce and recycle environmentally friendly packaging. Recently, Ice River invested in a sheet extrusion line by viscotec, which allows them to produce rPET sheet made from 100% recycled plastic. With their new line comes a range of possible new applications, such as heat-resistant packaging made from rPET100 sheet material.
PET thermoforms - a valuable input material
While the industry is still discussing how to integrate thermoform clam shell packaging into the recycling loop, Ice River Sustainable Solutions has convinced Materials Recovery Facilities to include PET trays in their PET bales and it gets recycled into Ice River’s 100% recycled water bottles. Solid State Polycondensation Technology allows to restore the material properties and super-clean the recycled granulate and accordingly, Ice River bottles and packaging made from recycled PET can be recycled again and again in an infinite loop.
iceriversustainablesolutions.com
Previously, green flake was destined to be down-cycled or sent to landfill but now Ice River uses it to produce their 100% Ice River Green Bottle Co. green water bottles.
