PETpla.net Insider 06 / 2019

BOTTLE MAKING 59 PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 06/19 www.petpla.net Planning and processing plants for the beverage industry A satisfying piece of work We met: Paul W. Clark and Larry LaFerriere Back in 1998, the founders of PET Terra Systems recognised the need in the plastic con- tainer and beverage industries for a more scientific approach to process and engineering; in January of that year PET Terra Systems (PTS) was incorporated. The company was started in 1998, but was founded with a core group of subject matter experts whose experience went back to the first commercial use of plastic beverage bottles in 1979. Tour Sponsors: The original PTS staff was built to combine manufacturing experience, pro- fessional engineering skills and statistical expertise. “Our objective was to apply sci- ence and process engineering to eliminate the widely held illusion that making plastic bottles was some sort of magic trick. Interesting is our process expertise, which is around blowing bottles and injecting preforms - that is my background. I started in the plastics industry in 1979, at Amoco Container, a company that now belongs to Silgan Plastics and was one of the first two companies to commercially produce a PET bottle, Paul explained. He went on: “Since then, we have grown both in size and scope of services. Our expertise spans all facets of a project from the exploratory phase through ongo- ing operational support. We have also expanded outside of plastics to include the food and beverage industry as well as other manufacturing segments within the United States and abroad. A good exam- ple of our unique capability is that most of the major bottling companies use our services to qualify new bottles. When they want to qualify a new resin or container, they ask us to support those efforts jointly in most cases with the various equipment suppliers like Krones or Sidel, KHS, Tech- Long and so on. That is not typical to an engineering design firm.” They support their clients from the very beginning. “We can provide concep- tual design services that provide a ‘visual picture’ of a proposed system solution. The conceptual design process allows us to generate multiple alternatives that illus- trate various approaches, configurations and layouts for client evaluation. Concep- tual design endeavors can involve com- plete plant layouts, processing areas, pro- duction lines or utility systems depending upon the proposed scope of a particular project. Our design work is done primar- ily in 3D which results in improved quality of the product as well as execution in the F.l.t.r.: Larry LaFerriere, Vice President of Operations, Heike Fischer, PETplanet, and Paul W. Clark, President