Industry comes together at EREMA Discovery Days 2018
EREMA has concluded its Discovery Days, which took place from 27th to 29th June in Ansfelden, Austria.
More than 1,000 guests attended the event among well-known companies from the plastics sector, such as Borealis, Engel, Greiner, Haidlmair and Henkel, who gave participants an insight into their view of working with plastics in a sustainable way.
Besides the technical and strategic answers presented by EREMA with regard to plastics recycling, the topic of circular economy presented an extensive array of perspectives.
At the beginning of the conference Manfred Hackl, EREMA Group CEO, summed up the challenges facing the industry.
"To reach the new European recycling goal of 55 per cent by 2030, more than 10 million tonnes of recyclate has to be used in the end markets. Compared to 2014, this corresponds to more than double the amount of recycled material. To achieve this, we as raw material manufacturers, producers, processors and recyclers together have to identify new markets, make use of previously untapped sources of plastic and foreground and implement even stronger design for recycling in the long term.”
The discussion between raw material producers confirmed that sustainability is playing an increasing role in company visions.
From the discussion, ‘Circular economy and raw material producers – parallel worlds or a complementary concept?’ it was highlighted that recycling is an asset in raw material production and sustainable end products call for the know-how of raw material producers in combination with the experience of recycling specialists.
Remarks of Plastics Recyclers Europe (PRE) focused on European initiatives such as EuCertPlast and RecyClass which aim to drive uniform quality standards in the use of plastic materials and design for recycling.
The third day was dedicated to trends in the reprocessing of production waste.
Speakers from SML or Brückner confirmed that more packaging manufacturers count on a combined production and recycling solution when investing in new equipment.
EREMA says the conference concluded only more intensive collaboration within the industry can collectively develop the required technologies which will meet the recycling targets and thus see more recycled pellets used in end products.