Who is Encorp Pacific?
Best known for the Return-it system in British Columbia, Encorp Pacific is the not-for-profit stewardship corporation that developed and manages the collection and recycling of ready to drink beverage containers in our province. Plastic bottles, one of the most recyclable types of beverage containers, are primarily made from PET (short for Polyethylene terephthalate).
What Happens to The Plastic?
This type of plastic is quite versatile in terms of what it can be made into. When people return their empty plastic bottles to a Return-it Depot like Willowbook Recycling, the bottles are counted packaged for shipping and sent to a processing facility. At the facility, the bottles are flattened and veiled together for ease of shipping.
Once at the recycling facility, the bottles are detailed shredded into smaller pieces and then the labels are removed. The shredded plastic is then washed and sanitized. After washing, some of the plastic gets formed into smaller flakes and sold to manufacturers to be made into various products. Most of the plastic is fed into a pelletizer which heats and forms them into small plastic pellets.
Where Do Processed Plastics Go?
The pellets are then sold to manufacturers to be used to make many new products. Most of the plastics collected at Return-it depots like Willowbook Recycling are used to make new plastic bottles. This is an example of a closed loop system where used plastic bottles get recycled into new ones over and over again as long as people keep returning them for recycling.
While the recycle plastic can be used to make other things like containers for food and other products, a closed loop system is ideal as the Plastic can be recycled and infinite number of times while other products can’t be returned into Encorp system for recycling again. To do your part, make sure you always bring your containers to a returning depot like Willowbook Recycling.