Just down the road from SIPA’s headquarters in Vittorio Veneto, a company called Ho.Bag Corporate has an increasing activity in bottle making.
A few years ago, Ho.Bag, which started life as a seller of accessories, mostly for cosmetics and personal care, extended into in-house production. It started in 2019 with an investment in extrusion-blow molding of polyolefin bottles, and this was followed last year by a move into production of small PET bottles.
Ho.Bag has acquired two ECS SP 25 single-stage injection-stretch-blow molding systems, including numerous molds made by SIPA. Ho-Bag is using these machines to supply customers with a notable range of container sizes, shapes and colors, in small and very small lots – down to as low as 10,000 bottles per order.
SIPA’s ECS SP units are robust, versatile, and very energy efficient, thanks in part to hybrid drive technology that uses servo-electrics to provide speed and precision in injection, with hydraulics performing more “workhorse” tasks. They have the shortest lock-to-lock time on the market, mold changeover can be performed quickly and simply, and the same hot runner system can used on different cold halves.
Ho.Bag has a keen eye on the environment. It is processing post-consumer recycled PET (rPET) as well as virgin polymer – not a problem in SIPA ECS machines – and among its color offering is an attractive black PET bottle that can be detected by near-infrared (NIR) detectors to improve sorting when used bottles enter the post-consumer waste recycling stream. Traditional carbon black pigments are invisible to NIR, so Ho.Bag uses a PET that contains an alternative pigment that reflects NIR, so automatic sorting machines in mixed waste recycling operations can see them and put them into the right stream. Once again, the ECS SP 25 has no problem processing this material.
SIPA and Ho.Bag are now cooperating on an increasing number of containers. Normally, Ho.Bagtakes care of product development in-house, but it can turn to SIPA for such services as prototyping and testing. It goes without saying that having your technology and technical service supplier almost on your doorstep is a not-inconsiderable advantage.