History

Our company was a vision that came to fruition in 1984 by Jean Luc Lavergne.  While most commonly heard stories are that people start companies from their garage, Jean-Luc has a unique twist with his story: he started the company in his bathtub… He was inspired one day when he was walking through the woods with a friend and they came upon an unsightly area of debris and trash.  The plastic caught his eye and it got him thinking about what he could do to help eliminate plastic waste and pollution.  His determination to help sustain the environment led him to develop a process to clean and wash PET bottles.  Eventually this then led him into starting a business where he was extruding PET sheet.  The proprietary cleaning process he developed was so effective at decontamination that the PET film he produced from it was approved by the FDA for packaging.  Below outlines the rest of the major occurrences and activities with The Company:

• 1988 Jean-Luc Lavergne founds the company as up-cycling of operation for post-industrial plastic feed streams.
• 1995 Plant opens to up-cycle PET from soft drink bottles utilizing proprietary decontamination technology.

• 1997 Sheet extrusion plant opens to convert PET recovered from bottles into sheets for the thermoforming industry (PET as a replacement of PVC).

• 1998 Compounding facility (LPC) is added to manufacture up-cycled engineering resins and alloys.

• 2000 The compounding division is awarded the first GM approval for a PET/FG compound (VNT 835) and also obtains QS 9000 Certification.
• 2001 Lavergne obtains FDA approval for up cycled PET flakes and sheet to be used in food applications.

• 2003 LPC lab is accredited with ISO GUIDE 17025 (A2LA).

• 2004 LPC obtains TS 16949 Certification.

• 2004 Lavergne sells the PET extrusion plant to increase its focus on compounding up-cycling.

• 2005 Alliance is formed with an OEM for closed-loop up-cycling system