WILSON — Absolute Plastics LLC, a producer of sustainable plastic ware, is laying off its remaining employees as the company permanently closes its facility later this summer.

The company will lay off nine employees this round, affecting mostly production level workers.

Absolute Plastics, in a notice sent to the North Carolina Department of Commerce, stated that all separations will be accomplished by June 2019.

The layoffs this summer, which will result in the permanent closure of the plant, stem from changing customer demands.

“The decision follows a loss of significant customer volume coupled with a desire to consolidate operations to align with the current and future needs of its customers and eliminate excess manufacturing capacity,” said CEO Paul Cobb.

This announcement comes after two other rounds of firing. In January 2018, it was reported the Wilson plant would cut 75 to 100 workers due to significantly downsizing.

In the first phase of these layoffs, starting in March 2018, 16 workers were fired. The second phase, which occurred in August of that same year, 52 employees were terminated.

Absolute Plastics notified the Department of Commerce of the upcoming layoffs in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires companies to give a 60-day public notice of mass layoffs.

Employees at the Wilson facilities will not be able to use seniority to bump employees at other facilities out of their positions. This is because they are not represented by a union.

Absolute Plastics, which is a subsidiary of rePlanet Holdings Inc., is a manufacturer of  food containers that are portable, disposable, dishwasher-safe, microwavable and recyclable. The company’s environmentally-focused products are purchased and used by food service distributors such as food processors and retail outlets.

The company has a second manufacturing facility in Visalia, California.

So far, North Carolina has seen 3,272 employees laid off through WARN notices in 2019. North Carolina’s 2019 WARN summary can be found here.

This story is from the North Carolina Business News Wire, a service of UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism