Thickness reduction

As part of the company’s sustainable development policy, caring about the natural environment and customer safety, ERG S.A. strives to reduce the weight of the products by reducing their thickness and by decreasing in this manner the amount of raw materials used in the manufacturing process. Packaging weight reduction is an approach followed by the company for a long time now, but it has been yielding increasingly positive effects in the recent years. Since 2016, the company has been implementing optimisation projects whose common goal is to reduce thickness, while maintaining high product performance at the same time. One of these projects, completed in 2017, involved the purchase of a film production line equipped with a hot needle perforator. By implementing the innovative solution and by replacing the existing one, composed of two processes: film extrusion and perforation, a reduction was achieved in energy consumption per 1 kg of film produced. The original formulation has made it possible to reduce thickness by almost 17% compared to the standard used on the market. In the following year, a project co-financed by the European Union was implemented, resulting from own R&D work aimed at starting production of 6 micron film, 14% thinner than the standard film used on the market. On top of that, in 2019, the company launched another project aimed at reducing the weight of specialist embossed film used for tyre production.