RICHMOND, IND. (Feb. 16, 9 a.m. ET) -- Perpetual Recycling Solutions has hired veteran PET recycling buyer Phil Cavin as senior director of purchasing for the $30 million plant in Richmond that the company is opening in December.

Perpetual said Cavin will procure the 125 million pounds of curbside and deposit PET bales needed to operate the plant, which will initially make 75 million pounds of food-grade PET flake annually.

The 100,000-square-foot plant, which has been in the planning stages for more than 16 months, was announced at a Feb. 2 news conference.

“We are fortunate to have Phil Cavin lead our procurement efforts,” said David Bender, who is CEO of Perpetual and the Chicago-based holding company, Re: Think Recycling Group LLC, which Bender and two others founded four years ago. “His deep industry experience and knowledge of material recovery facilities will ensure our plant has the raw materials required” to operate efficiently.

Cavin was most recently sales consultant for Plastrec Inc. in Quebec. He previously was national procurement director and PET sales director for Mohawk Industries in Summerville, Ga., where he was responsible for procuring more than 200 million pounds of PET annually.

“I’m honored to be part of [Perpetual],” Cavin said. “Perpetual Recycling Solutions is going to be a recycling showplace.”

The recycling plant is slated to have two lines. The first line will have the capacity to produce 75 million pounds of food-grade flake annually from a raw material input of 107 million pounds, which is roughly equivalent to 823 million plastic bottles. A second line, scheduled to be added sometime in 2013, will produce a minimum of 35 million pounds of food-grade flake annually.

Re: Think also owns Pure Tech Plastics, a East Farmingdale, N.Y., recycler that it bought in October 2008.

Perpetual expects to sell primarily to customers making bottles or thermoformable sheet for food packaging. “But we expect there will some purchases of our flakes for use in high-end apparel and in the automotive industry,” Bender said.