FENC buys into US recycling industry
Polyester giant Far Eastern New Century Corporation (FENC) has acquired US PET recycler Phoenix Technologies, a Texas-based company with annual capacity of 36,000 tonnes.
The deal, conducted through the company’s chemical fibre subsidiary APG Polytech USA Holdings, represents FENC’s latest investment project in North America after it purchased a plant in West Virginia and an R&D centre in Ohio in early 2018, and obtained approval to invest in a plant in Texas at the end of last year. Phoenix is the third production site FENC has acquired in the US over the last 18 months.
Due to growing demand for ‘green’ products in the US, FENC has a strategy to invest in sustainable projects in order to satisfy downstream global beverage brand and consumer product clients.
The plant will offer synergies with the West Virginia subsidiary in Apple Grove, which is a former Mossi & Ghisolfi (M&G) PET facility. M&G entered bankruptcy in 2017 and started selling assets including this site and one in Corpus Christi, Texas, shortly after. FENC bought it in January 2018.
The Apple Grove facility added 360,000 tonnes of annual PET capacity to FENC’s output, and was the company’s first production site in the US. At the time it said that it wanted to be close to customers, in addition to taking advantage of increasing non-tariff barriers to trade for imports into the US, lower energy costs, and the appreciation of the Taiwan dollar against the US dollar.
FENC is the world’s second largest recycling producer and third largest PET resin supplier and has been involved in recycling since 1988. It has facilities in Taiwan and Japan, with annual outputs of around 50,000 tonnes each, and the US.
