PETpla.net Insider 07+08 / 2013

EDITOUR REPORTS 15 PET planet insider Vol. 14 No. 07+08/13 www.petpla.net A Pioneer in the Polish PET Market expands his business In Radomsko Alpla are setting up a new plant for the manufacture of 1,000 to 1,200t R-PET per month. 2013 is the scheduled start of production. The basic mate- rial for production is used PET bottles from the Polish market. The returns quota for PET bottles today is around 40 % and these are separated out mainly from domestic waste. As far as the future is concerned, Alpla are bank- ing on the statutory regulations envisaged by the EU and at the same time on significantly higher rates of return. More than 20 years ago Alpla started up in Zywiec with the production of PET bottles. Today Alpla operates four plants in Poland for the manufacture of packaging. PET is processed at the Zywiec, Radomsko and Ostrow plants: manufacture of preforms and bottles in Zywiec and Ostrow, preforms in Radomsko.In Poland, sales of PET bottles within the beverage sector are becoming less and less important. Bottling plants are already operating their own stretch blow moulding machines starting from minimum fill capacities of 3 to 4 million PET bottles per month. At the same time, Alpla is concentrating its PET processing activities on preform manufacture. The preform business accounts meanwhile for the major part of annual turnover. Zywiec features two pro- duction facilities which are situated two kilometers apart. In the first of these facilities there are Husky preform systems in operation, in the second Netstal preform machines and several linear stretch blow moulding machines. The stretch blow moulding machines pro- duce PET containers for milk, edible oil, cosmetics and household packaging and have a total production capacity of approximately 30 million containers per year and per machine. The plant in Radomsko operates simultaneously Husky and Netstal preform machines. The total preform production at all plants was more than 2,3 billion preforms in 2011. The total requirement for Poland is estimated at more than 5 billion preforms per year, of which about 300 million preforms originate from the bottlers’ own produc- tion. This gives Alpla a solid market share in this highly competitive market. The annual consumption figures fluctuate, but are to a major extent dependent on economic data and weather conditions. n addition, the main season of the year is only five months long and there are no transition periods worthy of mention. According to Mr Biernat, the seasonal requirement can only be met by exercising a high level of flexibility i.e. keeping capacity in reserve. Mr Biernat is assuming a preform overcapacity of 30% in Poland. In 2011, for example, consumption of beverages fell as a result of the influence of economic and weather factors by comparison to the previous year. As a result of the better summer weather, it is anticipated that 2012 may just end up nudging the level achieved in 2010. Full inspected! PVS-2 in line or off-line Sampling Quality Inspection System for PET preform PVS-2 is capable to detect all the possible defects that could appear during preforms production, reading the cavity number and weight all the preforms. All the data are filed in a SQL data base that can be shared over a LAN. PVS-2 can be connected to any type of injection moulder or used as a standalonemachine for the quality lab. The system can run at the speed of 1.100 preforms/hour. VISIT SACMI B5 - 302