Smart solutions for sustainable capping

On AROL booth at Interpack 2023, visitors experienced the latest capping technologies on product safety, a view on circular economy and on more sustainable packaging materials.

The technologies developed by Arol range from spindles and heads for ROPP aluminum caps on glass and can bottles, smart instrumented bottles (wireless Bluetooth torque and top load tester for off and on-line dynamic measurements), decappers, decrowners. Furthermore, Arol showcased tests on paper caps, thanks to the AROL LabV, a laboratory capper able to measure: approach angle, screwing stroke and angle, flat angle, total cam stroke.

Moreover the AROL stand showed everything that can help bottlers in the using pet at its best from an environment point of view: from the laboratory phase - with the innovative robotic station ClosureXpertLab, where new ultra-light and/or tethered caps are tested, including extra-light bottles with different percentages of recycled plastic- to the caps feeding phase with visual quality control, up to the dedusting phase (pre-capping), and to the fully servo-controlled capping cycle (Equatorque IQ- EVO).

"De-cap" to reuse: a concrete example of circular economy

More and more reuse and recycling schemes for beverage packaging are seen as efficient tools for reducing the environmental impact of packaging systems and for increasing their resource efficiency. In this scenario, AROL REVERSE is becoming a must for all those bottlers looking for an effective response to unscrew pre-threaded plastic caps and threaded aluminium caps from glass and ref-pet bottles. REVERSE, with between 3 and 30 heads, delivers safe unscrewing of caps with diameters of 28-38 mm, at up 60.000 caps/h (1.000 caps/min).

The machine’s decapping heads are made entirely of stainless steel; special handling parts, including discharge piping and containers, can also be supplied in stainless steel to prevent scratches to bottles and give longer life to components. REVERSE can identify bottles that do not have caps: its “no decapping” feature prevents bottle neck damage. The machines are equipped with advanced inspection systems for height variance at the infeed and cap detection at the discharge. REVERSE is designed for quick format change and is flexible enough to be adapted in any plant.

Blue Ocean Closures

Fully biobased, ocean biodegradable and recyclable: Blue Ocean Closures (a start-up based in Sweden) is the first to develop an innovative concept for cellulose fiber-based screw cap solutions using a technology enabling state of the art definition and stability with the potential to offer fully functional closure solutions. AROL has put at the service of Blue Ocean Closures its unique experience of over 40 years and + 25.000 equipment installed worldwide, to test the application of their new paper cap.

In the AROL Canelli (Italy) plant, a first set of tests have been carried out on PET preform thanks to Lab V, the AROL laboratory machine able to analyse the capping phase defined by five parameters: approach angle, screwing stroke, screwing angle, flat angle, total cam stroke. The tests have then continued using the smart instrumented Diamond Bottle, a wireless Bluetooth torque and top load tester.