PETpla.net Insider 12 / 2010

NEWS 8 PET planet insider Vol. 11 No. 12/10 www.petpla.net DöhlerGroup and PureCircle ally for Stevia development PureCircle, headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and DöhlerGroup, of Darmstadt, Germany, have announced a global strategic partnership for the development of Stevia-based ingre- dients and formulations. PureCircle has a large portfolio of Stevia ingredients; DöhlerGroup has established expertise in sweeten- ing, sweetening flavour and application. The companies have, together, 21 application centres around the world. PureCircle is a global leader in the production and marketing of natural high-purity Stevia sweeteners. It has invested around $200 million in its supply chain and infrastructure, which gives it control across plant breeding, harvesting, extraction, purification and application. It holds a number of US patents and has over 50 patent applications. Döhler is a global producer, marketer and provider of technology-based natural ingredients, ingredient sys- tems and integrated solutions for the food and beverage industry. Its product portfolio ranges from flavours and emulsions, natural colours and health ingredients, compounds, fruit preparations, alcoholic and non-alcoholic bases, dairy bases, malt and cereal bases to sweetening systems. www.purecircle.com  www.doehler.com AGR International and PET Engineering agreement on development Italian company PET Engineering and American AGR International have signed an agreement in order to achieve a technological development of the PET bottle, intended to pro- vide bottlers with constant quality monitoring of the containers being blown. The greater complexity of the blowing processes and the reduction of the process windows imposed by light- weighting require monitoring systems and automatic feedback in order to assure constant quality of PET containers. PET Engineering says that this agreement is representa- tive of its ongoing processes of development of lightweighting, including the development of ultra-light bottle projects finalized for raw material savings, savings in energy consumption and ongoing quality improvement, constantly monitored by AGR systems. Birkner’s Beverage World 2010/2011 The 15th edition of Birkner’s Beverage World, 2010/2011, contains more than 22,000 company profiles from 199 countries, in the book and the internet database. Information on over 5,600 breweries, 6,100 producers of mineral water, juices and refreshing drinks and bottlers, 2,600 distilleries, 1,200 hop, malt and raw material suppliers, 5,900 suppliers and 450 associations and institutions are included. The new edition features names and addresses, over 12,000 e-mail addresses, internet addresses and data regarding management, services, products and brands, machines and capacities, capital and turnover. The hard- copy edition is complemented by a regularly updated Inter- net database at www.beverage-world.com, wh ich offers unlimited multilingual researches within the subscription period. The book is available at €251 and access to the complete internet database at €284 p.a, directly from Birk- ner GmbH & Co. KG, Winsbergring 38, 22525 Hamburg, Germany. Fax: +49-40-800 80 1902; e-mail info@beverage- world.com. www.beverage-world.com KTW opens new test and application technology centre KTW (Kunststofftechnik Waidhofen an der Thaya GmbH) of Austria, which specialises in closure moulds, has almost doubled its application technology capacity and, on Novem- ber 1, commissioned a new, 1,400m² test centre. The new centre is designed for performance optimisation of multi-cav- ity moulds, mostly for mineral water and soft drinks - more than 5,000 cavity sets per year are allotted to this product group. There is also a significant focus on ‘personal care’ applications – flap and flip-top closures for shampoos and lotions, in multi-colour and multi-component design. KTW currently has eight injection moulding systems currently available for test operation, with clamping forces ranging from 500 to 5,500kN. The primary focus is currently on the trend towards multi-component applications, with multiple materials or multiple colours. Four of the eight systems are equipped with either two or three injection units; additional injection units equipped with individual drive systems that can communicate the process cycle in the corresponding machine control through the Euromap 67 interface are avail- able. KTW believes that the key to performance optimisa- tion lies in ‘fine-tuning’, to the analysis and optimization of the de-moulding process in particular. The company has a high-speed camera available to study the trajectory of fin- ished parts and the performance of the demoulding system. Thermal imaging cameras are used in the optimisation of flow rates in the multi-channel cooling systems. The layout within the test centre allows the individual regulation of flow rate to each machine, which enables optimum cycle times as well as accurate simulation of conditions in operation at the customer’s production location. In addition to the perform- ance tests of the injection moulds in their own test machines, the KTW applications centre offers sufficient space and the necessary infrastructure to additionally accommodate three to five customer-machines, which can be combined with the KTW manufactured injection moulds into production cells. www.ktw-group.com