The world’s third largest producer of flexible packaging, Constantia Flexibles (Vienna, Austria), opens the world’s first plant designed to produce more sustainable and recyclable flexible packaging only, in India. Production focus at the plant lies on the more environmentally friendly packaging family EcoLam. The official opening will take place on November 20 in Ahmedabad.
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| The Constantia Ecoflex Ahmedabad plant is equipped with state-of-the-art technology such as this blown film extruder from Hosokawa Alpine (Augsburg, Germany). |
The reduction of waste in general and plastic waste in particular is an important issue as much in india as anywhere in the world, and particularly for the country’s food processing and home and personal care industries. The Indian government has responded proactively to the problem, including adopting “Plastic Waste Management Rules’ as early as in 2016. Among other things, the rules prescribe to scrap single-use plastic like pouches completely by the year 2022. Another part of the new regulations is the phasing out of multilayered plastic, which is largely nonrecyclable. These “Rules” show that Indian government can exert pressure on the recycling economy and that it supports initiatives and companies which advocate for less waste.
That’s why Constantia Flexibles made a move to offer a solution at the source, in manufacturing.
“We know about our responsibilities towards the industry, the end consumers and–first and foremost–towards the environment,” says Alexander Baumgartner, CEO of Constantia Flexibles. “Thus, we are not only focusing on developing more environmentally friendly packaging, we also designed the first plant in the world dedicated to produce sustainable packaging only. The Constantia Ecoflex Ahmedabad plant is located in Gujarat in India, which is the perfect market to implement such a forward-looking project.”
After a construction time of more than two years, Constantia Ecoflex Ahmedabad started test runs in September 2019. The plant has an area of 24,500 sqm/263,716 sq ft, and currently has 50 people working at the plant, a number that's expected to triple by the second quarter of 2020.
The solutions produced at the new plant all belong to the innovative product family EcoLam, which is part of Constantia Flexibles’ innovative product line Ecolutions. EcoLam is a lightweight mono-polyethylene laminate suitable for a wide variety of packaging applications. Due to its mono-material structure it is fully recyclable and offers a carbon footprint that’s approximately 32% lower than that of comparable products.
The EcoLam family comes in different barrier grades (EcoLam, EcoLamPlus, EcoLamHighPlus) to deliver the barrier needs for a diverse range of products.
