PETpla.net Insider 03 / 2013

EDITOURS REPORTS 14 PET planet insider Vol. 14 No. 03/13 www.petpla.net Russia Tour Blog – around Moscow Today is an early start because we have three appointments scheduled one after the other. From the Europlast Group we are meeting the PET recycling com- pany Plarus and we continue with Euro- plast itself. Plarus operates the first bottle-to-bottle recycling plant for PET bottles in the whole of Russia. After the meeting with Plarus an interesting, wide-ranging discussion with the heads of the company at Europlast follows. Time is running short and after a brief tour of the factory we set off for our final appointment of the day with Protey. This involves a trek to the other side of Moscow, with, unsurprisngly, endless traffic jams. You just have to grin and bear it, as they say. Meanwhile all is not well with the Edi- tourmobil. Defective 12v plugs and a broken water tank display are two of the more pressing problems, but we are tack- ling them. The appointment with Protey goes on much longer than anticipated, well into the evening. The company is not only producing PET bottles but has other products including packaging for cosmetics and even plastic components for the car industry. Battling through the Moscow traffic is stressful, to put it mildly, and so, after the Protey appointment we decide to head towards the city centre where in the morning we have an appointment with Husky. 10 o’clock sees us at the Husky Refurbishment Center where we have a most interesting discussion on the Rus- sian market. The Editourmobil is unbearably hot. The air conditioning is just about working, and is about as effective as the flap- ping of the windmills in Don Quixote. In these uncomfortable conditions, we make our way to cap manufacturer Safe Cap in Fryazino - thankfully, there are no traffic jams to negotiate. With a tight schedule of visits planned for the next few days we decide it would be sensible to take things a bit easier and so we return to Moscow and pitch camp for the night next to our next day’s appointment at the Netstal Sales Office. The sun is shining, coffee is on the go, and here we are, sitting in the Netstal offices talking about their machines, the Russian market and the controversy over the proposed “beer ban”. All too soon, however, we have to take our leave and set off for our next appointment with Bericap in Bor, near Nizhniy Novgorod.) collected for the first time. At the moment the authorities representing the various Russian townships and regions are still very cautious and are showing only a modicum of inter- est in the idea. Russia, says Svetlana Lukina, is ten years behind Western Europe in this area. For this reason these trials are to undergo systematic improvement on a localised basis over the coming years and results collected in order to spread the message to other towns using this data. Thus the present level of capacity utilisation for the plant is based virtually in its entirety on the quantity of PET bottles supplied by companies who separate these bottles out of standard waste in various regions inside Russia. Once they arrive at Plarus, these bottles are sorted by colour where applicable using Bühler, Sorema, RTT and Titec machines, cleansed of extraneous materials, washed and recycled into flakes as well as granulate. Currently the plant is extracting 1t of recycled material from approx. 2t of bottle refuse. Bystrykh is hoping for a positive development from the political side but also thinks that the first attempts at regulation will probably call for a further development period of five years. www.plarus.ru July 10,2012 Europlast We met: Leonid Belyaev, CEO Vartan Bagdasaryan, Project Manager Pavel Fedyunin, Head of Marketing Viktoria Kashevarova, PR Manager (F..l.t.r.): Pavel Fedyunin, Leonid Belyaev, Vartan Bagdasaryan and Kay Krüger Development planning The production workshop in Solnechnogorsk, north of Moscow, is the largest plant within the Europlast Group. It produces 50% of the total production of all the Europlast plants and there are around 400 employees. Europlast has five more plants which are based in Vladivostok, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Krasnoyarsk and Rostov-na-Donu. In a meeting with CEO Leonid Belyaev and Vartan Bag- dasaryan, Project Manager and Pavel Fedyunin, Head of Marketing, we discussed the development of the company in the wake of the global financial crisis.