PETpla.net Insider 09 / 2011

REGIONAL MARKET REPORTS 12 PET planet insider Vol. 12 No. 09/11 www.petpla.net Along with his Pro- duction Director Juha Jaakko Niemelä and the whole team, Hannu is responsible for han- dling production. With the changeover from PET returnable to PET non-returnable bottles, a new Sipa plant with eight moulds has found its way on to the site. The 60-valve bottler is from Proco- mac. This line produces up to 14,000bph. The old bottling plant for PET returnables (AMS Ferrari) has been mothballed; the switch to PET non-returnable bottles made the bottom section handling arrangement completely impractical. In the neighbouring bay a second line is currently emerg- ing from the usable parts of the old plant, as well as a few other components. This line is expected to produce some 12,000bph. At present the plant is still being fed by an old Tetra stretch blow moulder with a capacity of only 6,000bph. As soon as the limit of capacity is reached the intention is to add a new stretch blow moulding machine to increase line capacity. So now both factories together can reach now 27,000bph with filling four lines and in the future 33,000bph. “We planned everything ourselves and we also do our own structural work, this is the only way we can be sure of knowing exactly what makes the installations tick and this enables us to do a great deal of work on the installations ourselves. Hannu is very clear about this: “If we wait around until an external engineer finally finds his way here, our short season may well be over” he says. Fortunately there were no such route-finding problems for PETplanet! Beverages are always bottled in 0.5l and 1.5l bottles only. Their own brand water also comes in light blue; the co- brands are available only in clear bottles. “Increasingly we are finding ourselves developing beverages for our customers. Whereas aromas used to come in from outside ready to use, the market has speeded up to such an extent that we actually undertake adjustments to the taste here on site.” To date Hannu has been producing almost exclusively for the Finnish market. A year ago, however, the company opened a field station in Sweden. The Finns are looking at this as a distribution point for a proportion of their products in the near future. www.finn spring.fi Hartwall Marko Rajaniemi, Technical Manager High speed and flexibility In 2001 Hartwallrelocated their entire production to Lahti,situated about an hour to the north of Helsinki. The large new factory buildings are now home to bottling plants for PET reusable glass, kegs and cans. As is the case everywhere in Finland, the reusable proportion is falling rapidly, and non-returnable cans and non-returnable PET are benefiting. The PET installations are based on Sipa stretch blow moulding installations featuring 24 moulds and a capacity of 1,800bph which load the Krones bottling plants via a rapid-delivery buffer conveyor in just a few minutes. The bottles are first of all rinsed at these filling stations before being filled. The filler plant is also capable of bottling beer, but there is as yet no call for this on the Finnish market. “The decision in favour of the Sipa plants was based on the need for very high output at the same time as high flexibility“ explained Marko Rajaniemi, Technical Manager. First the rinser, then the filler: the Krones line at Hartwall In total the company fills all types of casks with 3.2 million hectolitres of beer and soft drinks. The sizes of the PET bottles are, as is usual in Finland, 0.33, 0.5, 1.5 and 2.0l. Around one third of the soft drinks enters the market under licence to Pepsi: the remaining 2/3rds are own brands. As is the case throughout Finland, the bottles tend to be heavy: the 0.5l bottle weighs 26g, but they are currently in the process of converting to 24g. “Up to now, Finnish customers had always been used to refillable PET bottles; now they want to drink out of robust non-returna- ble bottles”, says Rajaniemi. Hartwall, as a 100%-owned subsidiary of Heineken, is able to fall back on its parent company’s contracts when buying in materials. The Sipa stretch blow moulder in the background, front left Marko Rajaniemi and Alexander Büchler www.hartwall.fi Sinebrychoff Michael Slotte, Project Manager “For us, change is a challenge” Sinebychoff prefers to use the last five letters of its name as an abbreviation, so it is also known as “Koff”. Like the other two big breweries, the brewery produces the entire range of water and soft drinks in addition to beer. It also operated under licence from Coca Cola. However, some of its soft drinks are actually marketed under own- brand labels. In 2008/2009 the company also invested in 2 plants for new non-returnable PET products. Sidel with 20 moulds was chosen for the stretch blow moulder. As a high