PETpla.net Insider 03 / 2011

BOTTLE MAKING 36 PET planet insider Vol. 12 No. 03/11 www.petpla.net ing. The preform cartons are automat- ically unloaded, heated and blown out of round. In addition, two edges are pressed mechanically into the bottle in the blow mould. After the leakage check we move on to the actual new station for auto- matic handle fixing. Here the handles are loaded in the correct position via a hopper, compressed and snapped into place on the edges. After that we move on to the automatic pack- ing station which is where we load the bottles on to pallets so that they are dust-proof. So you see, nowhere does a human come into contact with the preform or the bottle! This is the best we can offer our customer, too! PETplanet: An innovation of this sort has got to be maintenance- intensive? Mr Verma: It isn’t any more but you’re right, in the expansion phase it took us some time to get to where we wanted to be. But at this point I would like to say a big thank you to and express my appreciation of the team from Sipa they were always on hand and, when they needed to, they worked round the clock. I have been buying machines from a very wide range of manufacturers for 20 years and there are technical problems with every machine, but the service provided by Sipa is up with the best I have experienced. PETplanet: And you produce the handles yourselves too? Mr Verma: We have 8 injection moulding machines of different capac- ities in operation at our premises and these are primarily used for manufac- turing the handles and the caps for our bottles. This means that we can always offer a complete system with bottle, cap and handle. PETplanet: Your boss, Anupam Lunavat, has said that JRD is aiming to be the market leader in South East Asia by 2012 and worldwide by 2015. Mr Verma: We are constantly expanding. Double figure growth rates in the higher range during the course of the year are normal. Each year we invest in new machines. Even in the last few years during which the indus- try in general has been reluctant to enter into any commitments. We do all this with our own money and with no help from the banks. Coming up are a further IML plant and another Sipa installa- tion. So as to clear sufficient space for the new machines of plant we have, for example, moved all our old machines 500m further out into another bay. This is also where our bulk materials store is. But here at the parent plant things have once again become so cramped that the Sipa installation is having to sit alongside the old equipment. PETplanet: And what about your future plans? Mr Verma: We intend to expand into the sector of PP hollow plates for construction. As regards this, we have an exclusive agreement with an Italian engineering company. Only just round the corner from here a plant is being built at the moment which will accom- modate four lines. PETplanet: Thank you very much, Mr. Verma, and I wish you every success. www.jrddubai.com www.sipa.com The new Illig plant shortly before commissioning. It is capable of thermoforming up to 600 million cups/a. Alessandro Piccino, Sipa and Alexander Büchler in front of the preform installation which produces oil pre- forms as well as preforms for juice bottles.