Starlinger supplies equipment to Russian packaging producer
Russian company Kazanskiy Zavod Sovremennoy Upakovki (KZSU) has officially inaugurated its new production plant for AD*STAR block bottom sacks. Tatar President Rustam Minnikhanov personally attended the opening of the plant, which is situated in the ‘Himgrad’ technology zone in Kazan, the capital city of the Republic of Tatarstan.
In the new plant, KZSU is producing AD*STAR block bottom sacks for the packaging of cement, gypsum, chemicals, fertiliser, animal feed and other dry bulk goods. The entire production equipment for the sacks, which are made of coated polypropylene (PP) tape fabric, was sourced from Austrian machinery supplier and technology leader Starlinger & Co.
The investment includes extrusion, weaving, coating and printing lines, as well as two ad*starKON sack conversion lines and a recoSTAR universal recycling line for treating the production waste from Starlinger. The plant has a production capacity of 44 million AD*STAR sacks per year; they will be supplied to Russian and foreign companies, among them JSC Chemical Plant Karpov, Asia Cement, Poliplast, Knauf Gypsum, Servolux (Belarus) or LLC Cement Plant Samadov (Tajikistan).
In the past few years, Starlinger has installed 10 AD*STAR production plants in other former Post-Soviet states; this is the first complete AD*STAR production plant that has been set up in Russia.
Safe and sustainable packaging that saves money
AD*STAR sacks are a very safe option for packaging dry bulk goods. Due to the coated PP fabric they do not break when dropped, squeezed or bent, and are resistant against humidity, providing reliable protection for the content. Cement companies that use AD*STAR sacks were able to lower the in-house breakage to less than 0.2 per cent and breakage during transport to under 0.9 per cent.
This brings important savings in cement production as the need to replace lost cement is reduced to a minimum: Given an average breakage rate of conventional cement sacks of 4.2 per cent and an annual average production of two million tons of cement, this would amount to 62,000 tons of cement that could be saved. Additionally, the environment benefits from less CO2 emitted during cement production and less pollution of the environment due to spilled cement.
The brick-shaped sacks are perfectly suited for automated filling and palletising and can be used on every high-speed roto-packer. The highly automated production process of AD*STAR sacks is very accurate, guaranteeing minimum size variations and consequently trouble-free filling. The sacks are tight, ensuring that their entire content stays inside. Also with the optional micro-perforation (600,000 holes/m2), which is necessary for aeration during the filling process of cement, the AD*STAR sacks are leak-proof and virtually dust-free.