On 29 October 2014 over 130 existing and potential international customers and guests invited by EREMA were at the company's headquarters in Ansfelden near Linz in Austria for "Discovery Day 2014". The focus of the EREMA's series of events this year was on in-house recycling, one of the global market leader's core competencies. With first-class talks given by experts representing the entire value chain and live demonstrations on several types of INTAREMA systems, EREMA demonstrated how the quality of the end products can be kept constant with intelligent in-house recycling solutions while saving production and labour costs at the same time.

Flexible packaging accounts for a quarter of the world's plastic applications. Special polyethylene (PE) film applications such as shrink and stretch films and biaxially oriented PP (BOPP) dominate the field here with annual growth rates of 3-5% in the market. As material costs account for a majority (over three quarters) of the production costs, less production "waste" also means lower costs for raw material and disposal. With "Don't waste your waste" as the motto, EREMA showed how you can use intelligent in-house recycling solutions to return up to 100% of the plastic "waste" to the production process and thus save production and labour costs. Over 130 existing and potential customers and guests of EREMA came from the whole of Europe, Russia, Israel, Thailand and Senegal to benefit from the first-class information about the latest trends and product news in this sector. Experts from the well-known companies Borealis, SML, OCS, Polifilm Extrusion and EREMA provided valuable insights in their presentations. The live demonstrations took place in the EREMA Customer Centre which, together with a plastics analysis lab, features worldwide state-of-the-art engineering.

Intelligent in-house recycling solutions

In-house recycling solutions for flexible plastic packaging are a core competency at EREMA - some 2,000 of the over 4,000 EREMA systems sold around the world operate in this application field. The new INTAREMA plant generation offers users an additional boost in efficiency: the new, patented Counter Current technology means even higher output capacity, the Smart Start system makes operation extremely easy with a remarkably high degree of automation and enhanced ecoSAVE technology reduces energy costs even further.

Existing and potential customers who want to integrate recycling in production benefit from EREMA being able to provide concrete solutions to individual challenges, especially in terms of quality and personnel costs. The perfect preconditioning of the plastic material prior to extrusion is crucial for the quality of the recyclate. EREMA fulfils these requirements with its systems through the combination of a preconditioning unit with the recycling extruder. The Counter Current technology also ensures remarkable recycling process stability despite varying characteristics and conditions of the input material. Thanks to the Smart Start system, however, the personnel required for the recycling process is kept to a minimum, which is important as in-house recycling systems often only run "on the side" compared to the actual film production plant.

Inline & offline

EREMA presented both inline and offline systems at "Discovery Day 2014". The recycling systems can thus be integrated not only in the production lines but also installed externally. For flexible and highly efficient offline applications EREMA presented to attendees the brand new EFS Crocodile system with a technical conveyor belt for the dosing of endless edge trim. This innovation enables the constant feeding of tangled edge trim without pre-cutting for the first time.