Distinguished Engineering Alumnus
Award Recipient
Carlos D. Gutierrez — 2010
This distinguished graduate earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1960 from North Carolina State University. In 1974, he founded Unisphere Chemicals, a company that specialized in the development and manufacture of surfactants for the textile and cosmetics industries. Gutierrez also co-founded G&H Industries, which managed multiple plants for DuPont. In 1992, he founded United Resource Recovery Corporation (URRC) to refine silver and recover PET from X-ray films. The company received its first of many US patents in 1993.
Gutierrez currently guides the recycling of PET in the bottle-to-bottle program and has been successful in the promotion of URRC technology to build production facilities in countries across the globe. In 2008 URRC formed a joint venture with the Coca-Cola Company to build the largest bottle-to-bottle polymer recycling plant in the world. The $50 million facility has a capacity of 100 million pounds per year.
Gutierrez is a member of the Wallace Carl Riddick Lifetime Giving Society and the NC State Engineering Foundation Board of Directors and recently created the Carlos D. and Barbara Hoyle Gutierrez Endowed Scholarship.
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Also awarded in 2010
Carlos D. Gutierrez