PETpla.net Insider 05 / 2011

BOTTLING / FILLING 31 PET planet insider Vol. 12 No. 05/11 www.petpla.net The new plant for manufacturing the shrink wrapping films reaches right up to the ceiling. blow moulding and the bottling block there is a 3.5min buffer stretch for the empty bottles. After that comes the wet sterilisation of the bottles. “We find that we are more flexible with wet sterilisation than with dry sterilisa- tion. Once that’s done, we can fill the bottles with any of the products” says Felix Nosov. A total of 600 million b/a are processed through the cold asep- tic facility at the plant. Water / CSD Parallel to this has been the development of the water/CDS area. A second plant near Kiev has now been added. There has also been a Blomax 24 there since 2009 although for CSD rather than for aseptic bot- tling operations. A total of 900 million bottling operations are carried out in this area alone. The bottle sizes vary from 0.5l to 2l. In May of last year ”Biola” converted all CSD products in one fell swoop to lightweight bot- tles with PCO 1881. “It took a lot of preparation but a gradual conversion operation was not an option as far as we were concerned“ said Felix. With their early breakthrough into PET aseptic technology in the newly developing Ukrainian cardboard packaging market, Biola have moved forward at a spanking pace: with the lightweight CSD PET bottles they are currently putting pressure on their customers. Nor can the Big Colas of this world rest easy. How much longer can they run with the lumber- ing PCO 28 in the Ukraine? Biola wouldn’t be Biola if it didn’t have one or two other surprises. In addition to a highly efficient stor- age facility for finished products, a textbook mixture / syrup area, a discharge station for paste-like base materials such as tomato puree, mango, banana etc. the plant has for some time now featured a film blow- The stretch blow moulding line is located at the dry end of the bottling plant, surrounded by haulage tracks and conveyor belts. Felix Nosov shows Alexander Büchler the new aseptic bottling line. Uniplast caps are not simply delivered to Biola, here we see a team from Husky and Corvaglia at Biola reviewing the cap fitting operation. ing line from Reifenhäuser. The preci- sion shrink wrapping films made from multiple layer HDPE foils for repack- aging are now being produced by Biola. In a joint development project with Reifenhäuser, “Biola “has been able, using innovative raw materials such as LLD-PE and metallocenes, to reduce the foil thickness from its former level of around 70μ to 50μ depending on the size/weight of the packaging. In addition to precision shrink wrapping films, the system is also capable of manufacturing lami- nated foils of similar thickness for laminating a range of substrates, in particular BoPET. By means of direct recirculation the system is able to recycle production waste itself. The installed annual capacity of the plant is approx. 3,000t and it is one of the first 3-shift plants for precision shrink wrapping films in the Ukraine. www.biola.ua