A Special Collaboration Gets a Handle on Plastic in Charlotte

Brewing produces a surprising amount of plastic. None of it goes in the beer, thank goodness. But breweries sell cans to go, and those are typically conjoined in groups of four or six by things called “handles,” manufactured from recycled plastic by a Eugene, Oregon, company named PakTech. (Brewers usually refer to handles as “PakTechs,” in the same way people refer to a facial tissue as a Kleenex.)

PakTech, in business for 33 years, is set up to collect, melt down, manufacture, and sell handles. Breweries don’t have that capacity. They’re busy brewing beer. But Mecklenburg County doesn’t recycle PakTechs from curbside bins, and craft brewers, a generally civic-minded bunch, don’t want a mountain of plastic dumped into the landfill, either.

They’ve found a solution at Innovation Barn, the nonprofit Envision Charlotte’s center for sustainable businesses and projects. On a warm weekday morning at the barn, housed in a former horse stable in the Belmont neighborhood, Envision Charlotte’s executive director, Amy Aussieker, shows me what happens once the plastic shows up.

In one corner of its Plastics Lab, a room just off the main entrance, 18 Sterilite bins perch on industrial shelves. They contain finely chopped plastic chips, each bin holding a different color: mauve, green, peach, yellow, black, four shades of blue. Aussieker calls the chips “flake,” singular. The flake gets poured into a spout atop a nearby machine called an extruder and injection molder, which heats the chips until they melt, then pushes the hot plastic out through molds.

The process: Innovation Barn shreds the PakTechs (1) to create flake (2), which is poured into an extruder and injection molder (3). Once melted, the plastic is pushed through molds to make products like coasters and “bricks” (4). Other molds (5) form beams for use in benches (6).

“I just did a bench last week,” Aussieker says as she steps to a table and touches a plastic block about the size of, well, a Kleenex box. It looks like an oversized Lego. She keeps stacks of them, in varying colors and patterns depending on the flake mix they’re made from. “So these are bricks made out of the PakTechs. You can use them for sheds, tiny homes, any place that you would use a cinder block.” She hopes Innovation Barn can eventually sell PakTech shed kits. On a table lies another product of the extruder and molder: what appears to be a rose-tinted, plastic two-by-four. She used some of those to make the bench.

The brewery-barn partnership began in early 2022, when Nils Weldy, then executive director of Charlotte Independent Brewers Alliance (CIBA), contacted Aussieker about a PakTech-recycling program on the West Coast. Since Innovation Barn began to collect them in February 2022, breweries like Free Range, Birdsong, and Divine Barrel, along with suburban operations like Southern Strain in Concord and Hoptown in Mooresville, have made regular deliveries of plastic—83,000 handles in total, Aussieker estimates—to the barn.

“We just want to be really good neighbors to all the people here in NoDa and Charlotte,” says James Amato, Divine Barrel’s sales manager. “And part of that—especially as a small business that creates a product like alcohol—is trying to reduce your footprint and do as much positive as you possibly can. … We knew other cities had similar programs, or at least some sort of recycling programs for these PakTechs. But Charlotte hadn’t until Innovation Barn came along. As soon as we heard that they were accepting them, we got really excited.”

The nonprofit also cuts donated used T-shirts and uses them to make dog beds, which Divine Barrel Brewing uses as sound-absorbing panels (below).

Jessica Brown took the sales manager’s job at Hoptown in April 2023 and, having heard about Innovation Barn, scheduled a tour “and just fell in love with the place.” She wanted Hoptown to be more environmentally conscious and sustainable, and recycling plastic that would otherwise end up in landfills sounded ideal.

“I spent 10 years in Seattle, and they recycle just about everything. It’s just kind of been ingrained in me,” says Brown, who moved to Oregon in June. “Just a tiny little step can make a difference.”

Breweries have taken other steps with Innovation Barn. Since July 2023, Birdsong, Free Range, and Divine Barrel have delivered more than 8,000 polypropylene malt-storage bags, each of which holds 50 or 55 pounds of grain, to Innovation Barn. Aussieker and her team have sent the bags to a Durham company, Beer to Bags, that converts them into totes that Innovation Barn and the breweries sell. Divine Barrel, which hosts bands, has found an unorthodox use for the dog beds that the barn makes out of old T-shirts: The brewery suspends them from the taproom ceiling to function as sound-absorbing panels.

Innovation, it seems, extends beyond the barn. “What’s amazing about partnerships, like with CIBA or this barn,” Aussieker says, “is that it gets people thinking, and then they come back, and they’re like, ‘Hey, have you thought about …,’ and it just spirals.”