PETpla.net Insider 09 / 2011

REGIONAL MARKET REPORTS 11 PET planet insider Vol. 12 No. 09/11 www.petpla.net two new PET installations direct. One was for the parent plant whilst the other was an additional installation for A le Coq (see Baltikum Report in forthcoming issues). The machine configuration was nearly the same; it was only the plant layout that had to be adapted to suit individual local circumstances. “The fact that we had two installations at our disposal for order processing meant that we were in a good negotiating position with our supplier. Ultimately, the reason why KHS was awarded the contract was because they succeeded in offering the right combination of quality and price.“ On the dry stretch, the displays come from the left and the bottles from the right The plant consists of a stretch blow-moulding line from Corpoplast with ten moulds and a filler which, in addition to water and drinks, can also be preloaded with CO 2 for bot- tling beer. Pentti has dispensed with a rinser. In 2008 there was still no question of a block installation as far as he was concerned because, at that time, the large-scale link up of blow moulding plant and fillers using star-shaped transfer mechanisms was still in its infancy worldwide. In Finland there is a need to focus on the dry component. This calls for a high level of automation because some very differ- ent types of packaging are used. A particular feature is the display – an injection moulded recyclable tray – which is loaded up along with the bottles, in addition to the classic stacks of shrink-wrapped sixpacks. The plant has a very wide range of filling volumes to process, starting at 0.45 and encompassing such exotic dimensions as 0.95 up to 2l. Under the Finnish deposits system the deposit on the PET bottle is twice as high if the volume is one or more litres; this is why it is possible, in this Land of the Lakes, to purchase 0.95l containers. Nevertheless, the bulk of sales is concentrated on the 1.5 and the 0.5l bottles. But to return to the displays. Displays are also avail- able for recyclable glass bottles and cans. This means that one robot is able to handle any type of container. At Olvi they have taken this to the extreme, which means, with the exception of the HGV, practically the entire in-house trans- port system is associated with the PET installation, the 2nd can line and one glass recyclables line. All the installations are sourced from either Krones or KHS. Due to the fact that cans are increasingly in demand with the Finns, the glass line is becoming less and less used. The reaction as far as the PET bottle is concerned is stable. In total Olvi is bot- tling 30 million PET bottles in Iisalmi per year. The products include water, soft drinks, energy drinks, cider and beer for home consumption (a 2.2% malt beer). Up to 18,000bph are delivered to the PET disposables line by a Blomax 10 Nevertheless, the main business is beer. There is a small but exclusive museum on site which deals with beer brewing and bottling. At the entrance there is a hop garden featuring around 100 plants. At a latitude of 63 degrees and 33.2 min- utes North, this has to be the most northerly hop cultivation site in the world. Only 3km further south there is the second most northerly hop plantation in the world, where Pentti tends 40 hop plants in his own garden. www.olvi.fi Finn Spring Hannu Ali-Haapala President and CEO Member of the Board; Juha-Jaakko Niemelä, Production Director From farm to filler plant It all began almost as a hobby around 20 years ago when farmer Hannu Ali-Haapala took a telephone call from his sister in London: “Hannu, the water you use for washing your laundry at home in Sykäräinen is a thousand times better than the water we have to drink here in London“. Hannu’s response was to begin bottling water from the spring on his own farm. The first big order came from Russia at a time when that market was just being opened up. “There were just two faxes and business was up and running, no marketing “, Hannu mused, looking back on how things were at that time. Since then, he has given up farm- ing – now there are two plants bottling 50 million litres of water and soft drinks in PET bottles each year. F.l.t.r.: Juha-Jaakko Niemelä, Hannu Ali-Haapala and Alexan- der Büchler for the Sipa plant Most of it goes into the proprietary brand “Spring“, but Hannu is also a co-packer for a large number of external brands.