PETpla.net Insider 05 / 2015

EDITOUR REPORT 12 PET planet insider Vol. 16 No. 05/15 www.petpla.net Visions of structure and own fibre production Preforms for the market leader La Preforme | April 30, 2014 We met: Mr Mohamed El Mouldi, Plant Manager We meet the preform and crown cork manufacturer La Preforme, whose headquarters are 35km or so south of Tunis. The relatively small company with 100 employ- ees and a production area of 20000 m2 is a subsidiary of the SFBT Group (”Société de Fabrication des boissons de Tunisie“), which has more production locations close to centres of population. “SFBT“, as Plant Manager Mr Mohamed El Mouldi, explains to us, “is the n°1 group in Tunisia in the manufacturing sector of beer and soft drinks. But to return to the story of La Preforme itself. The preform producer began life in 1983, initially manufacturing crown corks for the beer sector. In 1990 the company added preform production to its portfolio with the introduction of the PET bottle in Tunisia. Mr El Mouldi, who previously worked in beer bottling at SFBT, has since then spent ten years at the helm of La Preforme. “In the preform sector we currently manufacture exclusively for the CSD branch of SFBT. As for crown corks, we supply only around 40% to the group, the rest goes for export to central Africa“, explains Mr El Mouldi. On the technical side, the company uses Husky and Netstal machines, one of each. The 48-cavity machine from Husky has been giving good service since 1997. The line runs not only 26g preforms for 0.5 litre bottles but also 37g preforms for 1 litre bottles on two Husky moulds. The Netstal PET line was only acquired in 2013 which makes it virtually brand new. Here both 37g preforms for 1 litre and 45g preforms for 1.5 litre bottles roll off the production lines on 96 cavities and 2 moulds from Otto Hofstetter. All the preforms produced feature the PCO 1810 neck finish. Mr El Mouldi estimates that the total output today is around 180 million preforms per year, manufactured from around 7,000 tonnes of PET resin which La Preforme obtains exclusively from Korea, China and, to a lesser extent, Japan. “Since the arrival of our latest machine, output has grown so much that we now exploring a new project for the near future“, he says. “We are giving initial consideration to exporting a proportion of our production to Algeria“. Sogedes | May 1, 2014 We met: Mr Fadhel Belkhir, Plant Manager & Mr Feres Belkhir, Commercial Manager The emergence of Sogedes in Tunisia as a recycling company goes back to 2001. Even before it was estab- lished, Plant Manager Mr Fadhel Belkhir, had already acquired a good deal of experience in waste manage- ment and trading in the import and export of metal waste. Entering the plastics sector was an obvious step forward. His brother, Feres Belkhir, Commercial Man- ager, joined the company from Shell in 2006, but runs a parallel trading company specialising in Tunisian prod- ucts, mainly in the food sector, such as edible oils. The two describe their vision as to how the Tunisian recycling market might be revolutionised. Sogedes specialises in recycling PET bottles. From the very beginning, the company manufactured PET flakes and exported them together with flakes bought in from all over the coun- try. Sogedes obtains the bottles not only via collection centres but directly from collectors and also direct from the manufacturer in the form of scrap. Their condition on arrival can appropriately be described as a bit of a mixed bag, from reasonably clean to horribly dirty. Mr Fadhel Belkhier explains: “First of all, the waste goes through an initial sorting process, following which the bottles go into the crusher, with caps or labels still present. The next stage is washing when the labels and caps are removed. After further processing into flakes we are now left with virgin material, so to speak.” Sogedes currently has a capacity of around 500 tonnes of material per month, and at present between 250 tonnes and 300 tonnes are being processed. “We are currently assessing opportu- nities for recycling other plastics such as HDP, LDPE, PP or PE“, says Fadhel Belkhir. Depending on mate- rial input and season, up to 20-30 employees work in an area of 3,500m 2 . “The machines are made in China. Our hot wash line dates back to 2006, and at the time it was the first such machine in the whole of Tunisia“ says Fadhel Belkhir. “We export our flakes to Asia and Europe and sometimes the fact that the Asians may only want unwashed or cold-washed flakes we find a bit of a prob- lem. Requirements in the European market are different. “And what about their own continent? The response was immediate. “There is no export activity in Africa; vol- umes are too small to be profitable. From the start, we saw Sogedes developing in three stages: first stage is the crushing of the bottles, the second either hot or cold washing and the final stage would be the installation of a PET fibre plant to enable us to recycle the flakes ourselves”. Plans are well advanced, I discover. All the