With 80,000 all-electric machines in operation around the world,
Sumitomo (SHI) Demag’s strong focus is on the sustainable and resource-saving operation of injection moulding machines (IMM) in the plastic processing industry. The company is part of the Sumitomo Group which is headquartered in Japan and has four production plants — one in Japan, two in Germany and two in China.
Sumitomo (SHI) Demag is a world leader in all-electric IMMs and will offer its strong expertise in plastic packaging applications like thin-wall packaging and pails to the R-Cycle community and the whole industry.
Digitalisation is key for a circular economy and can transport the necessary transparency to the different process steps in the chain — regardless of whether for the more effective sortability of plastics in the recycling process or as an information carrier in the communication between different machine and processing operations in the context of Industry 4.0 applications.
Christoph Wynands (pictured below), product manager for packaging machines at Sumitomo (SHI) Demag, explained: “As a specialist for thin-walled packaging in the food industry, most of the products manufactured on our machines are made of PP (polypropylene) or HDPE (high-density polyethylene) and our customers want to significantly increase the recycled content in their products. In order to do this economically, they are particularly dependent on clean recyclate streams.
“Unfortunately, the corresponding approvals for the broad use of mechanical recycled polyolefins in the food sector are still lacking in Europe. Accordingly, we want to provide support here and see in R-Cycle a fantastic opportunity to improve the purity and quality of PP and HDPE recycling streams to such an extent that the necessary food approvals for the use of this recyclates can be achieved.
“Here, we want to contribute our expertise with technologies such as In-Mould Labelling (IML) and Injection Compression Moulding (ICM) to generate convincing applications and make them available to all stakeholders in cross-industry projects. In this way, we will generate new knowledge to be able to competently consult and convince as many packaging manufacturers as possible.”
Sumitomo (SHI) Demag will then use the digital product passport technology to provide detailed transparency about the footprint of their machines in the future.
Mr Wynands continued: “We review and analyse our internal value chain and discuss with partners and suppliers in our network the carbon footprint of our own machines and improve the supply chain whenever it is possible and necessary to reduce the carbon footprint. Furthermore, sustainable measures and ecological conducts are our very DNA.
The ecological impact and sustainable aspects are two of the highest rated criteria in our scoring charts when we evaluate and prioritise all our new developments. For this reason, we have streamlined our machine portfolio to all-electric IMMs and powerful services, for example, to support our partners and customers in the responsible use of virgin material and to enable them to increase the recycled content in their products.
“Or, even in the near future, to halve the energy consumption of their packaging production by upgrading from a conventional hybrid IMM to our all-electric PAC-E without losing a single millisecond of cycle time.”