The green machine

Interplas Insights finally found itself back in the live international trade fair environment. This time at Greenplast in Milan, Italy. There Rob Coker spoke with with Managing Director of Arburg Italia Rafaelle Abbruzzetti.

What does it mean for you to be returning to a live, in-person event?

For sure it is something that we have been waiting for for two years. It’s good – and different now – to meet different people and establish relationships with current customers and with new leads that I must say that are coming quite numerous you see a lot of people that are looking forward to meeting again in person. It’s different to the way we did business over the last two years. Webinars and online meetings are a good new way of communicating but it should be in parallel to the traditional ways.

We all became a bit fed up of the online webinars and conferences over the past two years, yet – and not just in terms of technological developments – sustainability targets have developed too, hence why Plast has been rebranded as Greenplast for this year. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’ve brought here to Milan?

We have an application made of one electrical injection moulding machine which is one of our A series of fully electric technology for Arburg injection moulding. This is producing a cup made of biodegradable material – a bio-based PP from Borealis. On this we are printing a QR code with all the information related to the cup, which you can find simply with an application on your smartphone. There you will learn all about the ingredients and materials, technical data sheets, and you can find all the information about the machine parameters. This is part of a project we are involved in with Borealis called R-Cycle. We provide the technical contribution to the project in order to collect this information and transcribe it into the control system of the machine and make it available for the next product use. After the use of the product and during recycling, you can have all this information in order to guarantee upcycling of the material rather than downcycling. Then you get a better selection or polypropylene. This generates a level of post-consumer material quality similar to the quality of post-industrial material.

The QR code on the cup takes recycling of the product far beyond the traditional kerbside collection scheme?

Yes, but not for the consumer, more for the recycling facilities. They have access to all the information in the cup itself so that they can direct this cup to the PP recycling stream.

What are the sustainability advantages of using an all-electric injection moulding machine in comparison to its hydraulic predecessors?

You have a saving of energy that an electric machine can garuntee because hydraulic drives of course use more energy to move the pumps. Electric drives can do this continuously without as much need for human intervention in the event of downtime.

Is such technology then more compatible with industry 4.0?

Definitely. The machine interface and our MES system that we are also showing here guarantee the exchange of information and the transferring of a production order from the central system of the customer to each individual machine. The display here shows the booth but you can imagine it representing a customer’s production hall. From this software you can see which kind of order has been made. From this you also have access to all information relating to efficiency.

How close is Italy’s manufacturing industry to meeting eu sustainability and circular economy targets?

I think that these kinds of regulation were made recently and Italy is working hard on meeting them – especially the packaging industry at which these policies are aimed. Still, we are helping to work towards this target.

Recently, and due to current events in Ukraine and Russia, as well as the ongoing COVID situation, there has been a delay but exhibitions such as this are the right way to bring the thinkers together to find ways around these challenges.

Do you think the event should keep its rebranded name or return to the familiar Plast format?

I have also spoken about that to other people here and they said that renaming it was a smart thing to do. It is a popular renaming but I think the organisers perhaps just didn’t want to do a Plast show in the same year as a K show, but Greenplast is a different entitiy to Plast. We are here and, depending on the success, there could be a case for keeping Greenplast in some format. There are not so many exhibitions dedicated to plastics and sustainability. I think it was good idea to rename it this year but only time will tell if it will remain (An AMAPLAST source has confirmed that the 2025 event will be named Plast – RC).