The Fallingbostel project
ever PET-line at Eckes Granini's plant in Fallingbostel, a small
town in Lower Saxonia, Germany. The plant now produces a complete
range of packaging varieties for fruit drinks, including glass and
SIG Combibloc beverage cartons.
SIG Corpoplast has just completed the installation of its first ever PET-line at Eckes Granini's plant in Fallingbostel, a small town in Lower Saxonia, Germany. The plant now produces a complete range of packaging varieties for fruit drinks, including glass and SIG Combibloc beverage cartons.
In response to increasing customer acceptance of PET bottled products, Eckes-Granini decided to add self-production by in-line blowing and bottling of PET bottles at Fallingbostel to its existing outsourced blowing/bottling activities.
A new aseptic PET bottling line has now replaced an existing glass bottling line. The line has a capacity of 24,000 1.0 litre bottles per hour and includes a SIG Corpoplast Blowmax 18/III stretch blow moulding machine (with an AGR preform tester) with a rated output of 27.000 bottles per hour.
Before making any decision regarding the supplier of the stretch blow-moulding machine, a detailed technical and commercial evaluation of the equipment available on the market was carried out. The Blowmax reputation for high efficiency, easy access and maintenance, low costs, high guaranteed machine output and flexibility were reported to be the major considations.
The additional factor, however, was the clean operation of the machine, specifically the no-touch, no-turn, neck-down handling of preforms and bottles through the machine, with the SIG Corpoplast mandrels as means of transportation.
The Blomax was delivered on schedule at the end of July 2003 and will commence commercial in-line operation in the 4th quarter of 2003.
SIG Beverages is an internationally leading manufacturer of plants and systems for the production of plastic packagings as well as complete solutions for the beverage industry. Since January 01, 2002, the newly created division of the SIG group is comprised of the former SIG Plastics (previously Krupp Kunststofftechnik) and the former SIG Simonazzi (previously the wet area business of Sasib SpA). With its approx. 9400 employees, the SIG group, which focuses its activities on packaging technology, achieved a turnover of approx. €1,900 million in the financial year 2002.
