Mexico's Bioflex adding recycled content with Evo Fusion film line

León, Mexico — A flexible packaging company in central Mexico has become the first to purchase the Reifenhäuser Group's environment-friendly Evo Fusion extrusion technology in the Americas.

Bioflex Empaques Flexibles de México SA de CV is believed to have invested about $3.1 million in the equipment. It declined to reveal the exact figure.

Reifenhäuser GmbH & Co. KG Maschinenfabrik, of Troisdorf, Germany, showed the extrusion technology at K 2022, nine years after developing it for compounding in 2013.

Bioflex's Evo Fusion line came online several months ago. It is the ninth one in operation, according to Sascha Skora, Reifenhäuser Blown Film's senior sales manager. The other eight lines are all in Europe, Skora told Plastics News at an open house organized to demonstrate the technology.

Held at Bioflex's ultra-modern manufacturing facility on the outskirts of León a week before Thanksgiving, the event attracted interested parties from the United States and Latin America.

One of them, Eric Howard, chief growth and strategy officer at film producer Versa Pak Inc. of Celina, Ohio, was impressed. "It's amazing. This will be the benchmark for this market's ability to extend [post-consumer resin] use," he told Plastics News.

Asked whether the technology would spread rapidly, he replied: "Very. I think we will see a rapid proliferation of this [type of] equipment."

Another potential buyer, Maribe Ibarra Portela, plant manager of Colombian flexible packaging company Flexo Spring S.A.S., said: "It's most impressive because the machine allows you to recycle 70 percent of PCR material."

A colleague, Francisco Sereny, growth and development director at the same Bogotá-based company, said: "Before, there was no technology to re-use PET/PE, PET-MET and PET/CPP and now there is."

Ulrich Reifenhäuser, the German company's managing director, expects sales of the technology to flourish in Latin America and less so in the United States. "They're not interested in environmental issues in the U.S.," he said.

Christoph Lettowsky, technical sales manager for Reifenhäuser Blown Film, is one of a core group of 7-9 people behind the Evo Fusion project.

"We started 10 years ago with compounding. In 2019, when sustainability became hot, we realized we could come up with a solution to recycle material with volatile ingredients," he said.

The company is in the process of developing technology to recycle lower quality PCR material, said Lettowsky. It will be ready by the time the next K show comes around in October, 2025, he said. "The next step is [film with] five layers."

"In order to drive the circular economy, the recyclate ratio in blown film products must increase, and classic down-cycling must be limited," Reifenhäuser argues in an explanatory online note.

With Evo Fusion, manufacturers can process even low recyclate qualities into high-performance products easily and economically and increase the recyclate content, it adds. "In this way, processors open up new fields of application for recycled products."

The process relies on direct extrusion, which does away with the "energy- and cost-intensive re-granulation of the starting material," it says. "This means that fluff (film shreds) and all kinds of production waste and PCR material can also be processed directly."

The process is based on twin-screw technology, "which better homogenizes the melt and thus ensures a stable process. In addition, processors can de-gas the system very easily and effectively, removing unwanted components in the recyclate."

Ulrich and his brother Bernd are the third generation of Reifenhäusers to administer the group, which employs 1,750, including about 115 at the group's facility in Maize, Kan.

Steve Despain is vice president of the U.S. company, Reifenhauser Inc.

Versa Pak's Howard described the Bioflex facility as "one of the nicest I have seen anywhere in the world."

Built on 12.3 acres and opened a decade ago, it employs 800, most of whom work in a spotlessly clean production area covering 322,344 square feet, equivalent in size to 5.5 football fields.

The company, owned by Mexican entrepreneur Rodrigo Reyes, operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Reyes family has been a Reifenhäuser client for the past 10 years.