Sponsored by RKW
The team at RKW, a manufacturer of nonwovens and plastic films, discusses sustainability in the hygiene industry.
Plastics are under great pressure from the public to become more environmentally sustainable – a pressure that RKW, a manufacturer of nonwovens and plastic films, is facing up to and assuming responsibility for.
Due to the complex nature of sustainability, the company is tackling the situation on many levels from the raw materials to production. And one sector that the company has already found solutions for is hygiene.
The hygiene industry encompasses baby diapers, feminine care and adult incontinence – all of which have evolved into high-tech products in the last few years. For example, thanks to superabsorbents, improved core designs, skin-friendly nonwovens and breathable films, baby diapers have become lighter and much more functional. But now these products require a sustainable redesign, which RKW believes it can help with.
Reducing raw materials
Downgauging (reducing film thickness without compromising quality) is the first challenge that RKW has solutions for.
Here, the company has developed its RKW HyCare® and Aptra® films. While these have been supplied to RKW’s customers in the hygiene segment for years, improvements are continuously made. Now, the products are associated with raw material savings of up to 12.5% as well as other, important benefits, such as higher efficiency in the processing line and a significant reduction in transport emissions, according to the company.
Robert Koplin, head of R&D for RKW's hygiene segment, says: “The bottom line is that RKW has halved the average basis weight of backsheet films over the past 20 years – and this trend will continue in the future.”
He adds: “In this way, we save valuable raw materials and also reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions along the entire value chain.”
While RKW is increasingly using externally recycled raw materials in other business areas such as agriculture and packaging, this is a limited possibility in hygiene products due to quality and regulatory requirements. Therefore, RKW is pursuing other ways to contribute to more sustainable products, including fully biodegradable backsheet films and renewable feedstock-based films based on the mass-balance approach.
The mass-balance approach works similarly to green electricity: although consumers do not know exactly whether the electricity they consume was generated directly from renewable energy sources, the proportion of ecologically generated electricity in the overall grid increases in line with demand.
In the plastics processing industry, recycled or biobased raw materials are fed into production at the beginning and mathematically allocated to the end products. The principle offers advantages: greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, and fossil raw materials are saved, while product quality and properties remain the same, according to RKW.
Petersaurach in Germany, one of RKW's main production sites for hygiene films, is ISCC Plus certified and thus part of a closed and independently verified value chain that operates according to the principles of the circular economy.
The team at RKW say: “Within the ISCC network, RKW can, for example, source certified bioresources such as second-generation biomass (ie biobased waste or crop residues). These form the basis of a new generation of backsheet films from RKW.”
It adds: “The development of biodegradable films on the same basis is well advanced and promising.”
RKW says it is currently researching and developing to improve the climate footprint of its own products and is committed to the goals of a circular economy in the plastics industry. For instance, the company took a significant step forward in 2020 when it first converted all its German sites (seven out of a total of 19 worldwide) to energy from renewable sources. In 2021, the three French sites and the Belgian plant followed suit. These changes resulted in a saving of around 100,000 metric tons of CO2 per year. In terms of the electricity consumption of the entire group, this led to a reduction in CO2 emissions of 40%.
The other European sites will be converted to green energy soon.
Consistent recycling
Avoiding production waste is one of the most important measures to increase the sustainability performance of the RKW Group, it says.
The most important levers for reducing waste generated in the production process are optimised quality monitoring and the reduction of downtimes. One example is automated print image monitoring at the Nordhorn site in Germany. With this process, any defects in the print image on the films can be quickly identified and improvements made directly – thus avoiding unnecessary waste.
Elsewhere, at the Franklin site in the US, an automated film profile control system was put into operation to ensure consistent thickness and quality across the entire width of the film. In this way, there is less edge trim and therefore less waste.
The company says: “In almost all production sites, the film webs produced are also monitored online for possible defects that could lead to large-area defects or a deterioration in print quality in the subsequent production steps.”
It adds: “Thanks to the quality control systems described and various optimisation measures, the average production waste rate has been reduced by more than 10% from 2017 to 2020.”
An optimised network within RKW's production sites ensures that production waste and residues are fully recycled into the production cycle. Scrap is reused either directly within the production process, between different processes or even across sites. Each RKW site has its own recycling facilities in which rejects are processed into high-quality regranulate.
Further synergy effects are leveraged through cross-site cooperation. For example, if the scrap generated on-site cannot be used in production for technical or regulatory reasons, the regranulate is available to other plants within the RKW Group as a raw material. One example of this is the plant in Echte (Germany), where the rejects produced in Petersaurach in the manufacture of high-quality hygiene films are used, for example, in the production of trash bags.
Accompanying optimisation measures are being implemented at all sites to improve the separation and sorting of production scrap and thus ensure a higher reuse rate, according to the company.
The company says: “Sustainability relates to more than just products and production. The 17 United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to which RKW is aligned, also explicitly provides for the promotion of equality, diversity and inclusion in companies.”
It adds: “RKW explicitly supports this and signed the Diversity Charter this year. This is accompanied by a wide range of measures that a newly established internal group, sponsored by the company's management, is currently developing. These include, for example, the promotion of women to further increase their share of management positions, which is set to reach just under 30% in 2020.
“At RKW, sustainability is not just lip service, but a corporate goal.”
To find out more about RKW, visit www.rkw-group.com
