Completing the circle at Placon

Currently, Placon makes 22 million to 25 million pounds of recycled flake per year and uses it to make rollstock for in-house production. The recycled flake goes into about 80 percent of all the packaging Placon produces, primarily food and retail packaging. About 60 percent of Placon’s products are custom while the remaining 40 percent are stock items.

Tom Mohs, Dan’s late father, started Placon in 1966 with a thermoforming machine he built in his basement to make plastic jewelry boxes. Today, the privately owned company has more than 750 employees with facilities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Massachusetts. It has annual sales of more than $200 million. 

Placon has more than 30 U.S. patents and continues to be a leader in the thermoforming industry.

Placon had early success when Tom Mohs designed and patented a small retail package designed to hang on a pegboard and hold fasteners. He started with his jewelry box design and added a living hinge. This was the first clamshell container, and he trademarked the name BlisterBox.

Another milestone came in 1991 when Placon developed the first recycled PET retail package in the U.S. and was introduced to Walmart stores as a retail partner. 

“Walmart initiated its first green program around packaging in the early 1990s, and our customers were trying to respond to that,” Mohs says. “There were a lot of companies experimenting with different things like polystyrene solutions, but we decided we were going to try to use post-consumer recycled PET bottles and thermoforms.”

Placon initially purchased recycled PET sheet from Wellman Plastics Recycling.

“We used to make all those clamshell packages out of PVC [polyvinyl chloride], so, when we started forming in PET, we learned a lot of hard lessons,” Mohs says. “It didn’t bend the same way, it didn’t form the same way, and we needed to adjust a lot of processing and tooling. With a lot of learning over a hard couple of years, we got to the point where it was second nature.” 

Mohs says that, through its customers Alco Fasteners and Anchor Fasteners, Placon was able to supply its post-consumer PET for all of the fastener packages at Walmart.

Placon was riding the crest of the green wave. “Recognizing we had something unique, we decided that we might be able to market this to other customers,” Mohs says. Customers soon had an option to have their clamshell packages made from PVC or post-consumer PET.

Many of those customers wanted the recycled content, and Placon improved its technology to make the cost of producing a clamshell package with recycled PET about the same as one made from virgin resin.

“The market was moving in a way that we thought that environmental concerns and sustainability was just beginning to take hold,” Mohs says. 

In 2001, Placon started buying recycled PET flake and extruding its own sheet on a new extrusion line.

It began selling food containers with 35 percent recycled content in 2008. The flake was not FDA-approved, so Placon co-extruded it with a virgin material layer in contact with the food. Now, EcoStar is approved for food contact, and Placon’s food containers are made with 75 percent or greater post-consumer content.

Placon closed the loop when it built a processing plant in a former lumber company warehouse next to its headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, and turned it into a recycling facility. Placon now sorts, washes and processes waste bales into PET flake that can be used in new EcoStar sheet.

“The recycling factory was an extension to vertically integrate and produce our own flake from post-consumer recycled bales,” Mohs says. “We wanted to secure a better source, and the way to do that was through our own recycling factory. It was both cost and availability of the resources that we wanted.”

Placon invested $16 million to convert the building and buy necessary recycling equipment. 

“We were sourcing flake from all over the world, and it just really wasn’t meeting our quality requirements,” Mohs says. “That caused us to look at technology to build the recycling facility.” 

Mohs says Placon executives spent two years talking to equipment suppliers and visiting recycling facilities in the U.S., Europe, Mexico and China to learn about recycling equipment. “We learned from equipment vendors as well as the recycling factories about how we wanted to engineer our EcoStar facility.”

Placon eventually settled on Italian machinery manufacturer Sorema Plastics Recycling Systems to manage the project and supply all equipment.

Baled material enters the system on an in-feed conveyor that goes through a bale breaker to separate the bottles. The next stop is a pre-wash station that tumbles the bottles and washes them with steam and a cleaning solution to remove labels, glue and dirt.

A SpydIR-ES automatic sorting station from National Recovery Technologies Inc. uses laser sensors and cameras to remove non-PET and colored bottles. The bottles are then washed again with water and detergent.

A manual sorting station, typically manned by four people, catches anything that slips through the automatic sorting station.

Next, a wet grinding unit grinds the bottles and thermoformed containers into flakes.

Some flakes at this stage go through a second hot wash to make them suitable for food contact.

The next step uses tanks to separate cap and ring material from the PET flake. The flake sinks while the cap and ring material is skimmed off the top.

The remaining flake is rinsed, dried and tested. Before being bagged, it goes through a Satake flake sorter. The sorter removes any colored flakes that might have slipped through the process. The remaining flake is then ready to be extruded into clear, thin-roll stock for new packaging.

Placon has three extruders from Davis-Standard to extrude rollstock.

Water is cleaned and re-used.

The recycling plant runs 24/7 and has 50 employees. The recycling line has a total capacity of 36 million pounds per year, which exceeds Placon’s current in-house demand. 

Placon’s original business plan was to sell excess EcoStar material. “We had a major flaw in our original costing models having to do with the yield from the bales,” Mohs says. 

It turned out that the PET bales sometimes yielded as little as 45 percent of the bale’s weight in flake. “We underestimated the yields coming in, and we thought we would have a profoundly different cost structure and that was one of the big mistakes we made,” he says.

“We weren’t able to get an acceptable price for the material, so we decided we did not want to compete in that space. We sold it on the outside initially just to build volume, but quickly decided that wasn’t a market for us.”

Mohs says the company decided to produce only what it needed and to commercialize EcoStar through its thermoformed packaging. “That’s how we add value, and that’s how we differentiate in the thermoforming space.”

Has the investment in the recycling facility been worth it?

“Right now, I would say yes, but for years it was very much in question,” Mohs says. “It wasn’t an instant money-maker and it is still a little bit questionable. I think strategically we always knew, and I am a really firm believer in what we are doing.

“We did it for a long-term play. We really believe that if our industry is going to exist in the future, there are a lot of challenges. One of them is the green aspect or sustainability. This is good for our industry. It’s good for us.”

Mohs says Placon always wanted to be a leader in sustainability and has stuck with it even when in-house recycling did not add to the bottom line.

“In the last year, I felt like a switch was flipped and that all of a sudden the hard work that we have done for years is starting to be recognized and we can commercialize it,” Mohs says. 

“People are starting to come to us. When we first launched food-grade material, I thought customers would beat a path to our door. But it was more of a slow trickle. It’s been a long road.”

So, what is ahead for Placon? Later this year, the company expects to announce a circular economy program with a major customer. It will likely be a program where Placon buys and recycles the same weight of bottles and thermoformed packages from a region that its customer sells in the region. 

“We have other things in the works that we cannot announce right now, but we plan to be more active in taking back thermoforms and helping our customers meet their goals of reusing their own materials,” Mohs says.

“Strategically, what we are doing is extending the circular economy to actually extract materials from the areas that we are selling into.”

Mohs believes the recycling industry needs to address bale quality if it wants to grow and prosper. “The industry needs to continue to invest and create higher-yield bales and greater efficiencies around the MRF [materials-recovery-facility] level,” he says. Shipping a bale across the country that yields only 65 percent of its weight in good flake is not efficient.

“Why are we shipping around and taking up space and sorting all of this stuff that is not PET? I think improving bale quality needs to be the next wave of improvement in the recycling industry,” he says.

For more information: Placon Corp., Madison, Wisconsin, 800-541-1535, www.placon.com