NEOCAN - innovative, natural gas-free, recyclable and CO2-neutral.
Blechwarenfabrik Limburg (shortly BL) is known for its innovations in the metal packaging industry. Now, they are presenting the NEOCAN as a new product on the market.
As the winner of the German Environmental Award 2020, the highest endowed environmental award of Europe (500.000 €), the company has the responsibility of a role model. All processes have been reconsidered for years. And the result is: a particularly sustainable can.
The company has managed to create a unique metal packaging. There is no usage of natural gas or other fossil fuels at all for the entire BL production process of NEOCAN. For this cause, Blechwarenfabrik has independently designed production technologies for all stages of production or further developed existing approaches to the point where they were ready for use.
In the first stage of production, for example, the containers are not lacquered conventionally, which would be energy-intensive but instead, laminated with a PET film that is only a few µm thick. The company has been successfully laminating the inside of the can for many years now. The outer lamination including offset printing is new at NEOCAN. This innovation not only saves resources: It also contributes to the coating which is receptively BPA-free, chemically more resistant and abrasion-resistant. Conventional gas furnaces were also replaced by induction furnaces in the second and third production stages.
The NEOCAN is made with 100 percent locally produced renewable energy. This means that it is already CO2-neutral in scopes 1 and 2.
In the future, it will be increasingly important that resources are used as efficiently as possible and that they (resources) are managed in cycles. The NEOCAN is produced in a particularly resource-optimised manner. The production scrap that accumulates in the company is transported underground, via a vibrating chute to a scrap press. Everything is then pressed into cubes and sent to foundries for the manufacture of new products. When metal packaging has reached the end of its useful life, it still does not mean that the material’s life is at an end. Metal is almost 100 percent recyclable with no loss of quality. The recycling quote for packaging steel in Germany is over 90 percent and belongs therefore by far on the highest rate of all packaging materials.
For more: www.neo-can.de
