YADKINVILLE, N.C. — Unifi Inc. and its Repreve-recycled polyester brand are combining a commitment to Made in America and a mission of eco-friendly manufacturing in a big way in small towns in North Carolina.
That’s big, as in the largest texturized yarn manufacturing facility in the country with 72 texturing machines at the Repreve Recycling Center here and a Bottle Processing Center in Reidsville, N.C., that produces 75,000 pounds of clean PET flake a year from post-consumer plastic bottles, recycling more than 2 billion bottles a year.
Jay Hertwig, vice president of global brand sales, marketing and product development at Unifi, after conducting an extensive tour of the recycling center, and fiber and yarn manufacturing facility, said, “There may be some larger yarn texturizing facilities in Asia, but none that are as fully automated.
“We have to give all the credit to the vision that the founder of the company, [George] Allen Mebane, had,” Hertwig continued. “When he built the facility here in Yadkinville and the one in Madison, N.C., [where nylon yarn is produced] in the mid-Nineties — right when we started to see the transition of manufacturing from the U.S. and into Mexico and into Asia — the infrastructure that he
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