Erema, Austria – Solutions to meet the needs of the Chinese recycling market
This year, Shanghai is the venue of Chinaplas, making this high-profile trade fair a home game for the Erema subsidiary in China. The team from the company’s Shanghai subsidiary will be at the Erema trade fair hall 2.1, booth F53. Customers and interested parties can also talk to their contacts at the company’s headquarters in Austria in a video call if personal consultation is required. The entire range of services in the areas of PET recycling, post-consumer and in-house recycling solutions will be presented. Erema has enjoyed a very successful year in China with significant growth in turnover and orders for all of these applications.
Strong demand for recycling solutions
The increase in demand is strongest in the PET recycling sector. Ten Vacurema systems and, for the first time, a Vacunite system for bottle-to-bottle applications were commissioned during the past calendar year by Erema. There were also three Intarema TVEplus systems with ReFresher modules for recycling post-consumer material. A team of technicians from Austria was on the road in China for ten months to commission these systems on-site at customers’ plants, right across the country.
Quality, process stability and flexibility
The great demand for Vacurema technology is due to its high flexibility for bottle-to-bottle recycling, because it offers a wide spectrum of applications – including food contact packaging materials. Processes include inline preform technology, which enables post-consumer PET flakes to be processed directly into preforms, proven Vacurema prime systems, and the Vacunite systems, which brings together the power of Vacurema technology with vacuum-assisted Solid State Polycondensation (SSP). Delivering efficient decontamination, good colour values, IV stability, low energy consumption end-to-end, and a compact design, this process is claimed to meet the highest specifications for producers of food contact compliant rPET pellets.
Growing interest is also noticeable in the post-consumer segment. In Europe, the use of post-consumer recyclate has become a major topic in the plastics industry due to legal recycling regulations imposed by the European Union. With its Intarema TVEplus RegrindPro technology featuring ReFresher module, Erema plays a major role in making recyclates suitable for high-quality applications in the cosmetics and food industries, opening up new sales markets for their customers. Erema expects further growth in the production waste recycling segment as a result of China supporting companies in implementing suitable recycling solutions.
Erema doubled production area
At the company’s headquarters in Austria, Erema has been gearing up in recent months to meet the increasing demand worldwide for its recycling technologies. The construction of a new manufacturing plant doubled the production area in Ansfelden by the end of 2020. The expansion phase also saw an extension to the Customer Centre, where tests are carried out on a range of recycling machines using input materials supplied by customers. This was followed in January 2021 by the acquisition of a 40,000 m² site very close to the company’s headquarters, increasing production capacity by a further 60 per cent.
