Huhtamaki Group Internal Newsletter

SailsHUHTAMAKI Flexibles

New plant for enhanced solvent recovery

Tom Best, Martine Brisset, Annelien Hanje, Dick Huizinga, Suelen Lasquevski, Clare Moulson, Glenn OBrien, The Ronsberg Marketing Team, Ulf Wienbker, and Carlo Alberto Zaggia.

Sailsis published for you by Group Communications.Ideas, feedback and articles are welcome to

nina.riihela@fi.huhtamaki.com

3New plant for enhanced solvent recoveryMid-year 2012, the Tortona flexible packaging facility embarked on a construction project. The new plant, inaugurated in May, is bringing big savings - and the environment is happier, too.

the story continues

The first part of the project was to get a building approval to start construction. The Major of Carbonara Scrivia provided his support for the project from day one, since the new plant allowed us to achieve the highest environmental stan-dard for production that meets also the expectations of the local community, says Site Manager Carlo Alberto Zaggia.

Construction began in July 2012. As in all buildings, a foundation was built first, followed by equipment and electricity installation.

In spite of the contractor DEC IMPIANTIs strong grip, Carlo along with Marco Presotto, Technical Services and Maintenance Manager, and the operating per-sonnel at Tortona worked together to push the pro-ject forward.

There were 12 different suppliers at one time at the site, but Marco and his team were able to keep the project moving along without any delays, Carlo Alberto highlights.

The most critical phase in the project began just before going live when adverse weather conditions provided extra challenges.

Nature wasnt on our side. During the build phase, we had many days of rain and heavy snow. We even experienced a minor earthquake, which forced local authorities to review the building construction regula-tions and in practice this meant that we had to re-think and re-do some aspects of the construction to make sure that the plant complied with the renewed requirements imposed on buildings in a higher seis-mic risk area, describes Carlo Alberto.

The construction phase was completed without any injuries to employees or contractors.

How does it work?

Essentially, Tortonas new solvent recovery plant uses active carbon filled filters, more commonly known as adsorbers, to attract solvent vapors in the waste air during the printing process, allowing recycling of the solvents and thus closing the solvent loop in the facility.

Carlo Alberto provides us with a more detailed desc-ription of how the plant works:

Once the active carbon is saturated and cant retain more solvent, the filter is disconnected from the ad-sorption and replaced with another fully regenerated filter. The saturated filter is connected to a regenerati-

4on circuit in order to recover the sol-vent and re-establish the original ad-sorption power of the active carbon.

The regeneration phase consists of flowing hot inert gas (Nitrogen at 160C) through the carbon that under this condition releases all the trapped solvent. The nitrogen also acts as a carrier, transporting solvent vapor to a

condensation unit at -18C. Here sol-vent is converted into liquid form and separated by the nitrogen that is re-used in the regeneration process.

Then the raw liquid solvent is put through a filtration system to remove water traces, and then to a three step distillation unit from where Ethylacetate, Ethylal-cohol and other high boiling impurities are separated. The solvents are re-used for inks and adhesives dilu-tion in the production process, while the high boiling impurities are sent to external waste management company.

These steps are carried out with high precision and supervised by an industrial computer system that analyzes hundreds of parameters and executes them accordingly.

Striving for improved competitiveness

Before the project began, Tortona was equipped with a waste air treatment system compliant to the EU and local regulations.

Tortona was equipped with a catalytic oxidation unit, meaning that waste air containing solvent vapors were treated in a unit where the solvent was burned, Carlo Alberto explains.

Today, Tortona recovers >1.300 tons of solvents annually. Given the efficiency of the recovery system and the po-sitive impact on the solvent vapor captivation, fugitive emissions have been reduced significantly. The unit spent some EUR 1.1 million on solvents annu-ally and EUR 500.000 on solvent incineration.

The investment has lead to huge savings since today were completely independent of solvent supply.

Further benefits include the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 5.400 tons, noise by 4.0 dB and the vola-tile organic compound emissions by 15%.

An additional advantage is that without the new system Tortona would have to bring in 52 truckloads of sol-vents every year to have sufficient amount of solvents for production. Now with the recovery system in place there is no need to increase solvent storage capacity either.

With the investment we meet highest environment standards and the expectations of our customers and local authorities. It will improve our long-term compe-titiveness in Italy, but also in Europe, Carlo Alberto concludes.

Huhtamaki devoted 160.000 Nm3/h air treatment ca-pacity, corresponding to the facilitys current production capacity. The Tortona team is poised to move ahead with plans to increase capacity by 190.000 Nm3/h. The expansion is to coincide with the start of a new pet food laminate production line in 2014.

Carlo Alberto Zaggia.

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