Sustainable plastic packaging with

ManuliTech, based in Cambiago near Milan, produces multilayer blown films for customers primarily in the food and pharmaceutical industries. The company has undergone a rapid rise to success; in 2018, production capacity was around 12,000 tonnes, and in 2019, it was increased to 15,000 tonnes.

“ManuliTech has achieved a very high level of quality within a very short time,” said Nicola Pirani, Alpine’s representative in Italy.

The first Alpine line was installed at the site in northern Italy in 2020. The quality of the film produced from that line has been a key part of the firm’s rapid group, according to Alpine.

This was followed last year by the construction and configuration of the new, flexible 7-layer highperformance line with inline MDO to meet the emerging demand for full-PE films in Italy.

“The market for full-PE barrier films is growing in Italy, but it is still difficult for endcustomers to get these films in consistently good quality and sufficient quantity,” Pirani said. ManuliTech targeted this gap in the market with its capital investment.

In many cases, in order to achieve the desired product properties in these applications, composites have needed to be produced from different materials that cannot be fully recycled. Full PE packaging with films made from pure polyethylene composites, however, can be fully recycled after their original use and reused without material loss for end products, making for a more sustainable product, and resource efficiency. “We support this circular economy approach and offer our customers suitable solutions for it,” said Alessandro Manuli, managing director at ManuliTech. “This is a longneeded development for the sustainability principle and a promising growth market for us,” he added.

Italian packaging manufacturer ManuliTech has invested in a 7-layer blown film line with inline machine-direction orientation (MDO) from Hosokawa Alpine, to produce laminating and laminate films with an oxygen barrier in full PE. It’s the company’s attempt to corner the market for plastic packaging with recyclability credentials.

“More than 100 MDOs made by us are in operation worldwide,” said Stefan Sager, operations director in the film extrusion division