CarbonLITE Holdings LLC has announced that PET bottle-to-bottle recycling leader CarbonLITE will build a new $60 million plant in Pennsylvania. This facility, which is slated to begin operations in late 2019, will enable the company to increase the number of post-consumer PET beverage bottles it recycles annually by 50 percent.

CarbonLITE is one of the world’s largest producers of post-consumer, bottle-to-bottle, food-grade PET resin, with plants in Riverside, Calif., and Dallas processing more than 4 billion post-consumer beverage bottles annually. The company’s customers use the resin created through the recycling process to produce new, sustainable PET bottles and thermoforming products.

“Through state-of-the-art facilities, technologies and equipment, CarbonLITE is fully invested in and committed to helping preserve our precious resources, reduce the PET industry’s carbon footprint, diminish our landfill problems and protect our waterways,” said CarbonLITE Chairman and CEO Leon Farahnik in a statement. “With the addition of the Pennsylvania plant, our three facilities will save more than 180,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year.”

Nestlé Waters North America and PepsiCo are the primary consumers of CarbonLITE’s raw material in pursuit of their sustainability efforts.

Farahnik and the CarbonLite team believe that recycling is the only responsible option for PET. “Our motto is: ‘Treat the Earth well. It was not given to you by your parents, it's loaned to you by our children,’" said Farahnik in a statement.