Marchesini Group, leader in the automatic pharmaceuticals and cosmetics machinery sector, is committed to preserving natural resources, avoiding waste, recycling, and making responsible choices. This commitment reflects in the use of environmentally friendly and sustainable materials: the Group developed several machines and lines able to package products with different types of materials, including paper, recyclable and recycled mono-material plastics and aluminium. Each of these solutions is the outcome of research and development work directed at meeting the market’s demands: “More and more customers are calling us in for projects that involve the sustainability of packaging materials,” Group CEO Pietro Cassani tells us. “Good results in this area require a high degree of cooperation between ourselves as automatic machinery constructors and the suppliers of the packaging materials; the issue must be tackled with a holistic approach that considers all the requirements involved and increasingly embraces the packaging’s entire lifecycle.”
Machines and lines of the sustainability area
Marchesini Group developed a machine designed to carton vials in paper trays, at speeds up to 120 cartons a minute. This solution is presented together with a new-design paper tray, researched and developed entirely by the Group itself, which generates savings of about fifty percent in paper and about fifty percent in glue compared to the models currently on the market. What’s more, the new paper tray is less thick, providing space savings of thirty percent when products are combined inside the case, with obvious benefits during shipment in terms of load capacities and relative CO2 emissions.
The Group, which has been developing paper tray solutions as a valid, safe alternative to thermoformed plastic for more than ten years, has created this new prototype with the aim of guaranteeing even more responsible use of packaging material, while further reducing production costs and avoiding waste.
Marchesini Group also designed a complete line for blister products, comprising first and foremost an integrated, robotised solution which inserts tablets in a packaging consisting of seventy-five percent PVC-free aluminium, an entirely recyclable, infinitely reusable material, and then in a cardboard carton. The line could be completed by the installation on the machine of a Track & Trace technology by SEA Vision: from blister serialisation through to pallet aggregation, a single solution to protect the brand and safeguard the product against counterfeiting.
Innovations also include a thermoforming machine for forming mono-material trays in R-PET (PET recycled material) and a line comprising a Schmucker 12-lane stick packaging machine, a stick inspection system and a cartoner. This line is designed to process PP-based packaging materials (with and without PE) such as 100% recyclable mono-material plastics like OPP or BOPP with a metallised intermediate layer. Due to its suitability for food contact, this material is a worthy polyolefin-based substitute for the classic PET/ALU material for production of high-barrier flexible packaging.
The sustainability of packaging materials is only one of the many frontiers in which Marchesini Group is investing in order to comply with the paradigms of the circular economy: it is also engaged in other activities such as the business of Rinova, the company created to give new life to pre-owned original Marchesini lines and machines. In fact, through a remanufacturing process the Group is able to offer customers a solution more advantageous in both economic and environmental terms, with the same quality and reliability specifications.
