Circular Services is planning to tie together a range of materials recovery facilities into a network across the country. Its first depackaging facility, opened last month near Vero Beach, Florida, is a step toward that goal.
Plans for the facility began with Atlas Organics, the composting company that Circular Services acquired from Generate Capital late last year. For Circular Services, a recycling company backed by Closed Loop Partners, the deal represented a major step into the organics recycling space.
David Bahrenburg came to Circular through the Atlas deal, and he is now vice president of organics. He said the combination of the two companies sets up both for expansion.
"We have a unique shared vision for how we divert material from landfills," Bahrenburg said. "We want to be very innovative on how we keep food waste out of landfills and be able to recover packaging at the same time."
Circular Services joins a growing cadre of organics processors providing an outlet for food companies seeking alternatives to disposal. While several other depackaging facilities have opened in regions like the West Coast with disposal capacity constraints or diversion mandates, Circular Services says it built Florida’s first commercial-scale depackaging facility.
Bahrenburg said the state has become increasingly disposal constrained, given opposition to landfill development and the long development timeframe for new incineration capacity. Food companies operating within the state are searching for alternatives, creating an opening for an organics recycling company like Circular Services, Bahrenburg said.
The company's new depackaging facility is colocated with an Atlas Organics composting facility that already produces more than 90,000 cubic yards of compost annually, making it the largest industrial composter in the state, according to Bahrenburg. The site processes green waste from the county, but it will now add nutrient-rich slurry from the depackaging facility to improve the quality of its finished products.
The depackaging facility has a maximum capacity of 500 tons per week, which Bahrenburg said it has not yet reached. The company is actively pursuing partners to supply feedstock, including grocers and other corporate partners .
Atlas and its parent companies worked closely with regulators in Florida for close to 18 months to develop a permitting pathway for depackaging, which it hopes to follow again. Bahrenburg said the depackaging facility startup has been successful, but the company is learning from the process before it replicates operations in future locations.
The company is open to exploring expansion opportunities through both greenfield development and acquisitions, Bahrenburg said. Atlas has a history of incorporating acquired composting facilities — it announced a deal for three sites in Florida shortly after Generate Capital acquired a majority stake in Atlas in 2022.
Over time, Bahrenburg said Circular Services could colocate depackaging facilities near Circular Services' network of MRFs, including locations in Sarasota and Fort Myers. The parent company owns 35 materials processing facilities across its portfolio, which spans 12 states.
Since development on the Vero Beach depackaging facility began before the Circular Services deal, the packaging it separates is not currently sent to one of the company’s MRFs.
The economics become more attractive when pairing a MRF that can recover value from aluminum, PET and other packaging materials, while sending the slurry to a self-owned compost facility, Bahrenburg said.
"One thing that I agree with in Circular Services’ philosophy is this whole circular economy," he said. "How do we divert as much material from the landfills as possible? I think depackaging, especially in states like Florida, is really, really key to that."
