Progroup announced that production has officially started at its new sheet feeder plant (PW14) in Stryków, Poland.
The new high-tech plant will produce up to 200,000 metric tons of corrugated sheetboard. Together with the existing PW07 plant next door, it will in fact have a production capacity of 825 million square metres per year.
Progroup has invested around 72 million euros in the project at the site, which covers around 28,000 square metres, and created 50 new jobs.
According to Progroup, almost all standard grades of corrugated board can be produced at the PW14 plant, with a working width of 3.35 metres and a production speed of 400 metres per minute.
At the heart of the corrugator machine is the Modul Facer® MF-A concept, which was developed by BHS. The MF-A concept delivers a highly efficient production process and corrugated board of the very finest quality.
"We have always aspired to lead the way on technology in the industry. This means we need to test new generations of machinery with partners like BHS and work together to ensure they can operate stably," says Maximilian Heindl, CEO of Progroup.
The new plant utilizes a modern combined cooling, heat and power plant to keep CO2 emissions as low as possible. This involves using waste heat from the plant's own power generation either in an absorption chiller to "produce" cold, or feeding the heat into the heating circuit, as required.
PW14 also features a 32-metre-high, fully automatic high-bay warehouse with more than 14,000 storage spaces and four automatic storage and retrieval machines. It will be able to store up to two days of corrugated sheetboard production and allow for just-in-time deliveries by decoupling the time between the manufacture of the corrugated board and the production of packaging by the customer.
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