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Injection moulding is probably the most common
industrial manufacturing method in the world.
All plastic pieces, almost, are made by injection moulding.
But there is no-one except for Tetra Pak
who has the integrated injection moulding as a part of a packaging machine
so this is a completely new technology.
With the Tetra Evero Aseptic, we wanted to develop a packaging system
which is built on our carton technology
but with a package which is more similar and at the same functionality
as a plastic bottle.
One big challenge in this development work
was to find the right polymer to get the right properties of the package
but also to the right properties
for protecting the milk.
This is a completely new mechanical unit,
which has made injection moulding
in our Tetra Evero Aseptic system very simple and cost effective
We make just one part
in each injection moulding cycle
but we make it very, very fast.
We make it four to five times faster than any-one else.
This is actually the fastest injection moulding in the world.
The way the injection moulding works is that we apply the closure on a mandrel,
in the next step we put the paperboard sleeve on the mandrel.
Then we make the injection,
in just forty milliseconds.
We open the mould
just before the plastic is frozen.
That means that the plastic is semi-liquid
when we open the mould.
So, to realize this innovation
a lot of different competences were needed
with mechanical design, automation and polymer experts.
Starting with just a few persons,
we added another twenty people in this development work.
The first step was to make a test rig
to verify if this
idea was working or not
and actually, to our surprise the first shot worked.
Some people saw the commercial benefits,
already with this test rig;
that we could have a very low cost mechanical system
for the injection moulding.
It's a result of long experience
and knowledge
which I have built up in Tetra Pak during thirty years,
with development of packaging machine systems.
The innovation work will not stop with this,
in the future we have to look for that we cut costs even more
by minimizing the amount of plastic
but also to increase the speed. We will also work with adding
new functionality
so we can pack juices,
and this will need more innovations and it will be very exciting
to take part of that.