In this issue of SIPA SPEAKs, we take a look at key themes driving progress in PET packaging – and beyond. In alphabetical order, they can be summed up thus: digital services, packaging solutions, process integration, product innovation, sustainability.
Digital services from SIPA are the latest demonstration of what is possible with interconnectivity. SIPA has always been strong on partnerships along the value chain, and the Echo System service platform will enable those partnerships to grow. We say the services are digital, because they are computer-based, and a lot of it is about enabling individual pieces of equipment to talk with each other: XDATA for example is an innovative solution designed to enhance manufacturing performance, with a supervisor providing essential information to speed up processes, improve quality with continuous analysis, spot operating problems, and deal with them in real time. But there is a lot of humanity behind the Echo System. With the XRAY element, for example, customers can benefit from “augmented reality” remote interventions that virtually put a SIPA technician next to their equipment, even though the technician could be on the other side of the world.
Another one of SIPA’s strengths is in integration: conceiving, developing, and delivering fully multi-functional production systems that exactly fit the requirements of customers. Latest example of this power of integration is Xtreme Renew Sincro Cube, a system for creating filled and capped bottles from 100% rPET flakes in a single step. It starts with the revolutionary XTREME Renew system for injection-compression molding of preforms directly from rPET flake. Preforms then pass directly to an XTRA unit that stretch-blows the bottles, and then finally, the bottles are filled and sealed. It is the ultimate demonstration of SIPA’s strengths in using advanced engineering to devise fully integrated and highly flexible systems that pose almost no limit on customer needs and imaginations.
When it comes to the containers produced by its customers, SIPA’s approach goes well beyond what is normally expected of a processing equipment supplier. Complementing its capabilities in systems to produce preforms and containers, fill, seal, package and palletize them, SIPA has an enhanced ability to carry out preform and container design and development.
With a network of design centers across the world, a global team of experts can produce designs that take into account what a bottle or jar will contain, what specific markets it is aimed at, what the sales strategy of the customer is, and much more. They can apply their expertise not only to the container, but also to the label and/or other forms of decoration, and even the secondary packaging. SIPA helps its customers to develop and produce containers that are designed for recycling, and which can contain all the way up to 100% post-consumer recyclate, rPET.
Governing everything we do, whether it is related with the machines that SIPA makes or the containers that our customers produce, is an over-riding attention to sustainability and the wellbeing of the planet and the people who live on it. These are not empty words, this is not greenwashing. SIPA has demonstrated time and again that it is at the forefront of global efforts to produce packaging efficiently, reduce waste, and recycle used material. In previous issues of SIPA SPEAKS, we have already discussed the new brand, AWArPET, which stands for an environmentally conscious approach to the design and production of PET packaging. We continue to develop this brand.
Wherever the company goes – to visit customers, talk at conferences, exhibit at shows, SIPA will highlight its multiple capabilities to reduce consumption of materials, energy, water, and compressed air, and to create containers that use the highest levels of recycled PET– and which are fully recyclable, not only in principle, but in practice too. As we continue to experience global environmental, social, and economic conditions heading towards new extremes, we believe we all have a responsibility in trying to keep planet earth on course for a sustainable future.