American Beverage, in partnership with Closed Loop Partners, announced a $3 million loan to support the San Antonio-based facility of Balcones Recycling, one of the largest independent privately held recycling companies in the U.S. The loan, part of a multi-million-dollar investment across several partners, supports the development of a new 200,000-square-foot materials recovery facility.
The new facility will impact nearly 1.5 million San Antonio residents, multifamily buildings and commercial customers by better sorting and cleaning recyclables, allowing more materials to be processed and remade rather than wasted in a landfill.
“This state-of-the-art facility is a critical step toward improving San Antonio’s recycling infrastructure,” said Carol McGarah, executive director of the Texas Beverage Association. “We are proud to be a part of this project and build on Every Bottle Back’s work in Texas to ensure recyclables, like our bottles and cans, are remade into new materials as intended.”
The $3 million loan to Balcones from American Beverage, through Closed Loop Partners’ Infrastructure Group, financed the installation of new equipment to improve the processing and recycling of materials and add recycling capacity at the facility. With new sorting technology, the facility aims to significantly improve the recycling rate of a range of materials including polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles, which will be returned to supply chains and can be used for new bottles.
This project is expected to yield nearly 1 million tons of recyclables over the next decade. This includes nearly 60,000 tons of PET plastic and more than 20,000 tons of aluminum, both of which are used to make recyclable cans and bottles.
This investment is part of 65 initial projects that the leading members of the beverage industry – The Coca-Cola Company, Keurig Dr Pepper and PepsiCo – and its sustainability partners have committed to fund through Every Bottle Back. To date, the beverage industry has committed $39.1 million in funding nationwide. These investments are estimated to yield nearly 915 million new pounds of recycled PET and more than 87 million more pounds of recycled aluminum over the next decade.
