Ardagh Glass Packaging – Europe (AGP – Europe) has recently completed its newest greenfield project in Poland with the latest available suite of sustainable technology for reducing emissions and improving energy and resource efficiency. Greenfield projects on this scale are massive investments and rarely undertaken in Europe, so choosing the right contractors was of paramount importance.
Forglass delivered to Ardagh the batch and cullet plant as a turnkey system – from design and engineering, through fabrication of all components in Forglass’ own facility, to installation and start-up. The plant includes storage for raw material and five types of external cullet, all of the dosing, mixing and transport equipment, as well as a complete cullet return system for both cold and hot end.
The advanced system for weighing and dosing raw materials includes an innovation from Forglass, Vibe® – a high performance vibratory dosing feeder, which is more precise than specified and allows the new batch plant to operate just 9 hours per day while allowing the furnace to produce with maximum pull in the same time
The autonomous cullet dosing system provides precise dosing in a wide range of ratios between 20 and 80 percent cullet content. Noteworthy are two other innovations from Forglass included in the cullet return system: SmartScraper® and Selectable Grain Crusher™.
The SCADA control system is custom-designed for Ardagh, allowing functionalities like user permissions management, PLC live status, weighing parameters, 3 modes of sand moisture measurement, daily batch quality and precision auto-reports, and automatic adjustment of cullet and batch feeding up to recipe quantity. To ensure reliability, the system is equipped with double redundancy and four types of batch plant operation management.
Forglass and Ardagh teams are both very proud to inaugurate one of the largest single furnace container glass production facility in Europe and certainly one of the most environmentally friendly.