Bales of plastic inside the ORPET facility at the Port of St. Helens northwest of Portland.
credit:
Courtesy of ORPET
Oregon’s first recycling plant for plastic bottles held its grand opening near St. Helens Friday.
OREPET built its $10 million recycling facility at the Port of St. Helens. Bruce Sone is the company’s sales director. He said a major change in Oregon’s bottle deposit law made the project possible.
Last year, the state added water bottles to the list of beverage containers that consumers can return to redeem a nickel deposit. Until then, only containers for carbonated beverages — soda and beer — were covered under the Bottle Bill.
“We needed a certain amount of volume to have this plant pencil out,” Sone said. “With just the soda bottles it would not work. With the addition of the water bottles it put us over that number and allowed us to build this facility.”
Sone says before his plant started up, Oregon’s plastic bottles were being shipped overseas for recycling.
(This was first reported for OPB News.)
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