March/April 1999
Wellman Inc. transforms scrap PET bottles into polyester fiber that’s used in clothing, carpet, cushions, and more. This tour through its Johnsonville, S.C., plant shows how it’s done.
By Eileen Zagone
Eileen Zagone is an associate editor of Scrap.
The town of Johnsonville sits in the balmy, bucolic low country of South Carolina, nestled between the resort town of Myrtle Beach and the state capital of Columbia. In addition to being home to about 1,400 people, Johnsonville is home to a sophisticated plastic recycling facility owned by Wellman Inc. (Shrewsbury, N.J.), an international fiber manufacturer with six plants around the globe that produce polyester and nylon fiber for carpet, clothing, home furnishings, and other applications.
A portion of Wellman’s fiber is used inside cushions for couches and other furniture made in the Carolinas and elsewhere. You can also find its recycled polyester fiber in the athletic fleecewear that has gained popularity for its lightweight warmth, wicking, and quick-drying characteristics—as well as its recycled content. Wellman, in fact, has won awards for its Fortrel Ecospun fiber that’s used not only in apparel, but also home furnishings and more. You can even find the company’s fiber underfoot—in recycled carpet fibers and the floor material and mats in automobiles.
Wellman is widely considered to be one of the world’s largest plastic recyclers—if not the biggest—and it is the world’s largest PET recycler. The Johnsonville plant alone recycles an estimated 7 million PET bottles every day on its way to producing close to 1 million pounds of recycled polyester fiber.
This is one company that knows how to spin a good (recycled) yarn.
An Appetite for Scrap
To satisfy the Johnsonville plant’s hunger for PET, Wellman purchases both clear and green PET bottles from the 48 contiguous states, as well as Canada and Mexico. These bottles are invariably shipped by truck and arrive in bales—for space and weight concerns—with their colorful labels and caps still attached. (These will be removed later.) The firm draws its PET feedstock from a variety of sources, including bottle manufacturers, material recovery facilities, and curbside collection operations.
For Wellman, as with any scrap consumer, scrap quality is critical to ensure that its finished product looks and performs as required. John Hobson, group vice president, says Wellman is extremely conscious of the quality of the material it purchases, whether from states with “bottle bills” or those that supply material from curbside collection programs. Given the Johnsonville plant’s large appetite for PET bottles, Wellman purchases from both sources. The drawback with curbside material is that it often includes contaminants such as PVC bottles. These clear containers look like PET but are more brittle. More importantly, since they aren’t polyester-based like PET, they can’t be used in the fiber-making process and, hence, must be removed. To that end, Wellman has developed technologies that eliminate the contaminants that show up regularly in curbside-collected PET scrap.
As PET bales arrive at the Johnsonville plant, they’re stored in a vast, paved outdoor lot that can accommodate about two month’s worth of feedstock. As the material is needed for recycling, employees move and stage the bales adjacent to one of the plant’s two sorting and flake manufacturing buildings, then carry them by forklift inside as needed to officially start the recycling process.
Getting Down to Business
The first step in the processing cycle is the breaking of the PET bales. To do this, Wellman operates a debaling machine that automatically cuts the baling wire and loosens the compacted bales into individual bottles or small clusters of bottles. Using gravity and conveyor belts, the bottles then move from debaling toward the sorting area, where employees pick large contaminants out of the moving stream of bottles on the conveyor. The sorters’ keen eyes are also trained to identify certain PVC containers by their distinctive shape.
From this manual sorting area, the newly separated bottles pass through the automated sorting stage, where sophisticated equipment detects and removes PVC and then separates green from clear PET bottles. In this latter step, an “eye” detects the green PET and a puff of air blows it out of the stream of more valuable clear PET and onto a separate conveyor.
Once separated by color, the PET scrap is granulated, a process that aids in the removal and separation of labels and caps from the bottles. Water is used to both clean the granulated PET and float away the lighter-weight label bits and plastic caps. The flake is washed once more, then dried, and finally moved via a complex network of pipes to storage silos near the fiber production plant.
The arteries that move the flaked PET increase the plant’s efficiency by minimizing how much employees must handle and move material to keep the process ever-flowing, Hobson explains. Once the baled PET is loaded onto the debaling machinery, the only employees that handle the material are the sorters. One thing that immediately strikes a visitor to the Johnsonville plant, in fact, is the relative scarcity of employees. The plant operates around the clock in three shifts and much of the recycling process is automated and controlled by computers (and the employees who operate them).
Transforming PET to Polyester
From the storage silos, which contain PET flake segregated by color (clear or green), the material is fed into a central silo where a batch of material is mixed. The process is not unlike a recipe or the methods used to make a particular metallurgical mix in a steel mill: Ingredients are combined in precise amounts to achieve the desired finished product.
After the proper blend is achieved in the silo, it’s time to melt the clean PET flake and transform it into polyester fiber. Once again, the material moves via pipes to the top of the fiber production area, where it’s continuously fed and melted at about 500º to 530ºF, all the while being monitored for the proper chemistry. With the help of gravity, the melted PET is forced from the holding vat and through spinnerettes to form individual strands of polyester.
To visualize how the strands are formed, think of a shower head: Liquid PET is forced through the spinnerette’s holes like water through a shower head, creating continuous strands of polyester fiber in a variety of thicknesses.
A group of strands is formed at each fiber-making “station.” Of course, the spinnerette holes are much smaller than those of a showerhead, and they can form strands in different shapes such as round and solid, hollow in the center, or with faceted sides.
Each fiber-forming station produces about 300 pounds of fiber an hour. As the strands—which are as thin or thinner than a human hair—flow down from the spinnerettes, they begin to cool, take shape, and acquire a ghost-like appearance as they shimmy down to the floor below and on to the next stage of the process.
Downstairs, the continuously flowing fibers—think of Rapunzel letting down her hair—from each station are gathered together, then rolled and pulled along as the tension of each thin strand is checked. From here, the long polyester tresses move on overhead rollers to the next process in the drawing area. Here, the fibers are spread out in a thin, constantly moving layer and spun around a group of rotating stainless steel drums as they are bathed in steam. Drawing the fiber in this way helps set its tension and prepares it for crimping.
Crimping is, well, exactly what it sounds like, where a constantly moving, steamy mane of polyester fiber chugs through a crimping machine that creases the fiber. Crimping gives body, or loft, to the finished product. A couch cushion stuffed with crimped fiber, for instance, will have more give and will bounce back after being compressed. This step is so critical that the plant’s lab counts the crimps in finished fiber (among other tests) to make sure that the product has the exact number of crimps specified by the customer.
After crimping, the fiber moves up a conveyor and is layered in the back of a heat-setting machine that sets the crimps like curls in hair. The crinkly fiber moves slowly through the heat-setting process, emerging on the other side of the enclosed unit, where it’s pulled up toward the ceiling and then spun tightly around a finishing roller. Here, chemical finishes may be added to the fiber according to customer specifications. While many of the finishes and parts of the finishing process are proprietary, if a customer wants the fiber to have, say, a particularly shiny appearance, a finish can be applied at this stage to enhance its luster.
Then the fiber flows into a machine that cuts it to customer-specified lengths. Like crimping, cutting improves the fiber’s loft and makes it softer and lighter. Once cut, the material is transported via pneumatic tubes to the baling area. Moving the material in this way—without the need for employee handling—not only adds to the plant’s operating efficiency, but also prevents the downy, cut fibers from scattering.
Finally, the now-crimped, cut, and fluffy fiber is compacted into bales weighing about 600 pounds each, then wrapped and labeled with its specifications and a bar code before being carried into the plant’s storage warehouse. There it will await being shipped to one of Wellman’s customers around the country. More than 30 trucks roll out of the Johnsonville plant each day, filled with the firm’s lofty goods spun from yesterday’s soft drink bottles.
From Wool to Wall Street
While Wellman Inc. has gained notoriety for its innovative development of polyester and nylon fiber made from secondary materials, the company’s history is a tapestry woven from more traditional stuff.
In 1927, the firm was founded in Massachusetts as Hill & Nichols, a wool-combing operation. In 1954, Hill & Nichols opened Wellman Combing Co.—another wool processing facility—in Johnsonville, S.C. A decade later, Wellman Combing branched out into nylon and polyester fiber production using recycled feedstock. In 1969, the company changed its name to its current moniker.
In 1972, Wellman took its first step into the international arena by opening a recycled polyester and nylon fiber plant in Ireland. After a buyout in the mid-1980s, Wellman became a public company traded on Nasdaq and, in 1988, the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol WLM.
Expansion followed quickly in the subsequent years, with the company acquiring plants in Darlington, S.C., Fayetteville, N.C., and Marion, S.C. The firm also expanded internationally, opening plants in the Netherlands and France.
One key to Wellman’s success was the development, in 1993, of its Fortrel Ecospun fiber. Certified to be made from 100-percent recycled PET, the fiber is reportedly used by more than 100 textile manufacturers to make everything from jackets to fleece blankets. The success of Ecospun didn’t go unnoticed: The fiber won an environmental excellence award from the United Nations Environment Program and was later recognized by the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.
Currently, Wellman has the capacity to recycle more than 2.5 billion PET bottles annually in the United States alone. And the firm continues to grow by investing in new facilities like its recently built plant in Mississippi and improving the performance of its products through the latest equipment and rigorous research and development. And by the way, Wellman hasn’t abandoned its roots: It still processes wool, albeit in much smaller quantities than before. •
Wellman Inc. transforms scrap PET bottles into polyester fiber that’s used in clothing, carpet, cushions, and more. This tour through its Johnsonville, S.C., plant shows how it’s done.