Coesia’s AcmaVolpak division showed a continuous-motion, rotary-style, horizontal form/fill/seal system for pouches that uses a total of six turrets to open, fill, seal, and discharge stand-up pouches at high speeds. Bosch Rexroth and Gerhard Schubert GmbH are proposing a family of packaging machines that will be significantly more versatile, less costly, longer lasting, and more compact, because they have found a way to make the controls cabinet “superfluous.” One reason HP Indigo sees so much potential in its ongoing quest to take packaging into the digital age is because, unlike other niches in the printing sector, packaging isn’t going away. The jkr package design agency thinks digital technology has changed everything in the services jkr brings to its clients and now permits those clients to be bolder and take greater risks than ever before. Bossar showed a pouch-filling machine that occupies minimal floor space because a vertical form/fill/seal system hands pouches off to the walking-beam filling section. Premade pouch options were equally prominent at interpack, as Scholle demonstrated with its Clean Pouch concept. Latvian fish producer Brivais Vilnus is so attached to the idea of product clarity that its sardines showed up at two interpack booths in two completely different formats: a clear co-injection molded container from Weidenhammer with seamed-on steel lid and in-mold barrier labels, and a steel can with a heat-sealed clear barrier film lidding from O. Kleiner AG Flexible Packaging. Recognizing that counterfeiting isn’t just an engineering problem requiring an engineering solution but rather is a challenge requiring a consortium of community experts, Domino Printing Sciences suggests we take as formalized an approach to GSP (Good Serialization Practices) as we do to the better known concept of GMP. Faerchplast’s Meatpack+ concept includes a soaker pad from Paper Pak Industries that releases CO2 to give fresh refrigerated meats a nine- to 11-day shelf life rather than seven to nine days. Oystar calls its M-FS 30 premade cup filler “the next step into the future for filling dairy and food products” because it’s chainless, requires no lubrication, and relies on a series of platens to transport cups through dosing stations. KlearCan from Kortec is a co-injection molded retortable plastic can whose Kuraray ethylene vinyl alcohol barrier layer includes an oxygen-scavenging additive so that, once a metal end is seamed on, a two-year shelf life at ambient temperatures is assured. The first commercial user of Roll n Blow technology from Serac is the Moroccan cooperative COPAG, which has launched drinkable yogurt in a 180-mL bottle made from a roll of polypropylene that is cut into strips, shaped into a tube around a blow pipe, welded lengthwise, and then heated and blown into a mold to create a bottle ready for the filling line. Gartenfresh Jung of Germany has launched a fresh, refrigerated salad kit in the EasyLid package from Sealpac, an innovative concept that combines seal and lid in one solution with significant cost and sustainability advantages. KHS showed a groundbreaking innovation in sustainable packaging called Nature Multi Pack, a new way of multipacking PET bottles together with little more than dots of a specialized adhesive. Cama Group showed a cartoning machine whose motion solution, a linear servomotor from Rockwell, called iTrack, permits a machine footprint of 13 x 8 ft when a machine with a more traditional motion solution might measure 26 x 11.5 ft. Gebo Cermex had a robotic end effector made with 3D printing and also displayed advances in lightweighting of its machine components by using “honeycombed” steel construction and by substituting carbon fiber-reinforced polymers in place of metal. Both Method and P&G are said to be readying product launches in an Airopack all-plastic pressurized dispenser that is environmentally friendly and requires no harmful propellants. Nomacorc has launched a synthetic wine cork made of Braskem’s Green PE, a polyethylene made from sugarcane ethanol. Coca-Cola Italy in its Nogara facility has shown great interest in using the EvoLite packer from Krones, though they don’t apply the carry strap and use only the horizontal polyester band as a stabilizing element to get the multipacks through distribution. Whew—can’t wait for interpack 2017. pw
