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The US-based company will expand the capacity of Daman facility of Powerband (in which it acquired 74% stake in September 2016) and construct a greenfield facility in the country

The US-based Intertape Polymer Group Inc, which manufactures paper and film-based pressure-sensitive tapes for packaging industry, is planning to invest $ 20 million (about Rs 135 crore) to strengthen its business and enhance capacity in India.

This announcement, made by the company while declaring its third quarter results, follows Intertape’s acquisition of controlling stake (74 percent) in Powerband Industries Pvt Ltd (a global supplier of acrylic adhesive-based carton sealing tapes and stretch films located in Daman), in September this year. The remaining 26 percent state in Powerband is held by the Desai family which founded the company in 1994.

Intertape’s new investment plan involves capacity expansion of Powerband plant in Daman as well as the construction of a greenfield facility in the country. With this, the company is aiming to grow its business beyond North America, where it has been a dominate player, to fast-growing Indian market, which is expected to witness manifold increase in packaging requirement.

“We believe that it is critical to IPG’s growth that we expand from being a primarily North American producer to becoming a greater participant in the global market. This transaction materially furthers IPG’s strategy to expand globally due, in part, to Powerband’s presence in virtually every significant global market, as well as providing IPG with the benefit of access to a low cost and high growth jurisdiction,” said Greg Yull, IPG’s president and chief executive officer, on the occasion of acquiring stake in Powerband in September 2016.

Recycled plastic will help hundreds of children keep warm this winter. Tuesday 700 fleece jackets made from recycled water bottles arrived in the Quad Cities – a gift from Keep America Beautiful to one of its local affiliates, the Waste Commission of Scott County.

Spokeswoman Brandy Welvaert says the commission then donated them to Coats for Kids, the local program that gives winter coats to low income children. Each jacket has a label saying it was made from 25 water bottles.

“To help people think about what happens when they recycle, and have it in their minds that there is a closed loop, there is a cycle when it comes to recycling. So if you throw a water bottle in your recycling cart, it doesn’t just disappear, it becomes something else.”

Welvaert says many people find it hard to imagine that plastic can be converted into a comfortable coat.

“We actually talked with a little girl who’s the recipient of one of the coats. And the first thing she said was ‘Wow, this is really soft.’ It’s softer than other fleece jackets I have that are not recycled.”

The Coats for Kids program is run by the Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency, in Bettendorf.

At Brau Beviale 2016, Gebo Cermex unveiled the Agility 4.0™ programme. By increasing the productivity of beverage manufacturing plants, making them more connected, flexible and responsive – in a word, agile – this Advanced Production Systems programme plays a major role in making the factory of tomorrow a reality today.

The beverage market is changing fast. With distribution looking for more customised delivery methods and increased responsiveness, and with people showing different consumer behaviours that influence their purchasing decisions, the packaging industry needs to find new ways to improve line operations in terms of speed, efficiency, flexibility and versatility.

As we move towards the era of Industry 4.0, the smart factory has become an important and much-discussed topic in manufacturing, highlighted by the trend for an increasing use of automation, cyber-physical equipment and computerised systems for the acquisition and processing of data.

At Brau Beviale, Gebo Cermex demonstrated its contribution to the factory of tomorrow, addressing in particular the requirements of the beer, wine and spirits market – one in which the company has more than 50 years of experience. The company showed its leadership by offering customers increased performance via four steps in its asset management model based on design, build, maintain, and improve.

Design: taking advantage of line flow simulation to create a new agile production concept

At Gebo Cermex, designing a line concept has long been – and is still – a matter of expertise and one that helps to resolve the current challenges of Industry 4.0. Given the complexity in developing bottling and canning plants to distributors’ expectations, it is now up to computer generated modelling to solve the future challenges of Industry 4.0.

By combining its extensive knowledge and the power of computerised systems, the company has successfully brought the virtual factory to life. It is now possible to accurately simulate daily operations in a production plant, and therefore develop and test new production models, such as the dematerialised layout.

This substitutes traditional packing solutions with intralogistics by linking small specific production islands with automatic guided vehicles handling either semi-finished or finished goods. In this way, production can be customised on a mass scale without changing costs. It is a breakthrough concept that breathes ‘agility’ and which visitors were able to experience live via a Virtual Reality demo.

Build: simulating and supervising energy consumption

Sustainable production processes and the role that optimising energy usage plays are becoming ever more important in developing the factories of the future. How energy is being consumed and the carbon footprint created by a packaging line are now central factors in purchasing decisions.

The energy consumption simulation tool introduced as part of the Agility 4.0 programme can be used to audit existing installations or to assist in the design of new ones. It enables beverage producers to test a wide range of possible configurations, validate design variants and optimise energy saving proposals. It can be used in conjunction with the Eco Audit service from Gebo Cermex to help significantly improve the environmental performance of a beverage producer’s line.

With water an increasingly important resource, focusing on water management, particularly in relation to tunnel equipment such as pasteurisers, is also an important part of the sustainability equation. Contributing to this are the many features of the SWING® pasteurising system, now available as an upgrade for standard Gebo Cermex pasteurisers. Coupled with the PRINCE Plus pasteurising software, most recently enhanced with an Energy Advanced Diagnostic module, it offers a pasteurising solution which achieves the greatest water savings on the market.

Maintain: from real-time monitoring to remote video assistance

To achieve the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) of invested equipment, effective and connected maintenance and troubleshooting are vital in helping to reduce costly downtime, particularly given the increasing sophistication of packaging lines.

The conveyor monitoring software is a significant step toward the creation of the connected factory. It gives real-time views of the whole line’s conveyor running status, also providing preventive maintenance instructions and automatically generating email alerts listing the parts to be replaced, thus ensuring the continuous running of the line. No less important, in the event of a broken part, easy online ordering is just a click away.

The global Injection Molded Plastic Market was valued at around US$199.9 bln in 2015. It is expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 5% during the forecast period (2016 – 2024). It will reach US$296 bln by 2024.

The growth of this market can be attributed to its growing demand in medical devices, home appliances, automotive, packaging, and electrical & electronic end-uses, as per Hexa Research. The molding process involves injecting molten plastic into molded products and solidifying them. The growth of this industry can be accredited to properties like heat resistance, pressure resistance, minimum wastage, and low labor cost.

Prices of volatile crude oil, benzene, ethylene, propylene, and styrene can challenge market growth in the coming eight years. To overcome such challenges, the industry is trying to manufacture molded plastic using biodegradable products. The injection molded plastic market is segmented into applications, raw materials, and geographies.

Applications include automotive, building & construction, consumables & electronics, packaging, medical, and others. Packaging was the leading application with a net demand surpassing 30,000 kilo tons in 2014.

The injection molded plastic holds an immense potential in medical and automotive segments. Biocompatible, cost efficient and optical clarity method of production can drive this segment till 2024. Raw materials comprise acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), Polypropylene, Polystyrene, and others. Polypropylene accounted to over 35% of the total market demand in 2014. High demand for injection molded polypropylene in packaging, automotive, and household goods is likely to impel market growth in the coming years.

While Brexit continues to befuddle UK legislators—a recently leaked government memo suggests that Britain has no coherent strategy for leaving the European Union—and worry the business community, the medical technology industry remains robust, and suppliers are reaping the rewards. That is the case of Omega Plastics (Blyth, UK), which has invested more than £200,000 ($248,500) in new technology at its plant in Teesside, UK.

Part of the Omega Plastics Group, which operates three sites across the northeast of England, Omega Plastics manufactures specialized medical equipment.

Omega Plastics has installed a Fanuc Roboshot electric injection molding machine to increase productivity and improve energy efficiency at its plant in Hartlepool.

“The diversity and growth in the medical devices industry make this a fundamentally important market for our business. This is just the latest in a line of investments we have made in our people and the technologies they work with to ensure we consistently deliver the highest quality products and services to our customers,” said Gary Powner, Managing Director of Omega Plastics.

Earlier this year in March, as reported in PlasticsToday, Omega Plastics listed its priorities for 2016, which included “further investment in people, plant and machinery as we work to establish Omega Plastics as a serious UK contender in the prototype development, production tooling and injection molding industry.” The company has not reneged on that promise.