With 80,000 all-electric machines in operation around the globe, Sumitomo (SHI) Demag’s focus is on the sustainable and resource saving operation of injection moulding machines in the plastic processing industry.
Sumitomo (SHI) Demag is convinced that a collaboration within the whole value chain of plastic packaging will gain the biggest impact to transform the linear to a circular economy. Furthermore, the use of digital product passports can leverage benefits to many areas of our daily business. 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, product manager for packaging machines at Sumitomo (SHI) Demag, explains: "As a specialist for thin-walled packaging, most of the products manufactured on our machines are made of PP or HDPE 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. 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.”
Last but not least, Sumitomo (SHI) Demag will use the digital product passport technology to provide detailed transparency about the footprint of their machines in the future. Wynands stated: “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 since many years. 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 injection moulding machines 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 near future - to halve the energy consumption of their packaging production by upgrading from a conventional hybrid injection moulding machine to our all-electric PAC-E without losing a single millisecond of cycle time.”