Exhibitor Interview: Fimic
As part of our new Exhibitor Interview series, we caught up with Erica Canaia, Sales Director at Fimic to talk about industry challenges calling for a rise in educational initiatives, innovative filtration systems and the modification of the RAS Melt Filter into PVC recycling.
FIMIC is an Italian manufacturer of guillotines and automatic, self-cleaning filters for plastic recycling. Every single component of the machine is produced in-house and every machine is fully customised to match customers’ requirements and guarantee a product of the highest quality and efficiency. Continuous research on improvement and customisation, passionate commitment, and a fully equipped laboratory enable FIMIC to offer innovative technologies, savings and tailored solutions.
What do you think is currently the biggest challenge facing your industry?
In our opinion there’s two major challenges:
1. Strong anti-plastics sentiments and movements worldwide, linked to bans on use of plastics popping up at a planetary level.
We all know within the industry that plastics cannot be replaced as a whole, we know its advantages, and we know the real numbers related to CO2 impact reduction that plastics have compared to alternative packaging solutions (glass, aluminium, paper, etc…). The main problem is that such information unfortunately only stay within the industry and are not correctly shared by media to the consumers, who in the end have the real power. If they are correctly informed on how good plastics and plastics recycling can be for our lives, our environment, our pockets, they are the ones who can change this trend and they are the ones who can make brand owners change their policies.
Banning the use of plastics is not solving the issue of littering. It’s people who need to be educated and informed on real data & information, not just “rumours” or fake news, so that they can understand the value of waste and not just throw it away.
That’s why educational initiatives talking and answering directly to consumers about the advantages of plastics, the need for a circular economy of it, what one can do with plastics after its use, are to be heavily considered and supported from the industry (see AreYouR recycling communities in Facebook, for example)
2. Contaminations in input plastic waste streams are changing and getting heavier. This means needing for more automation, ease of operation, flexibility, cheap consumables and spare parts.
Fimic is able to supply all that together, in connection with a well-organized company structure, flexible enough to supply customized solutions to both standard and non-standard applications.
What do you think sets your company apart from your competitors?
Manufacturing specific products. Fimic is specialized in manufacturing automatic Melt Filters and customized Guillotines used in plastic recycling. Dedicating to the in-house production of only a few products, lets us concentrate heavily on their improvement, range of use, customization solutions, fast answers on after-sale service and very fast shipment of spare parts, and much more.
We have seen that today customers consider such services as fundamental in their choices for machinery suppliers, so we heavily invested (and are investing) in it.
Being a medium-small and very solid family company, specialized into specific products made Fimic one of the leading suppliers of automatic melt filters world-wide, in a time where this technology is more and more needed from all companies using recycling lines, independently from their location
Are there any new technology developments that your company is working on at the moment?
All the time! For example, Fimic recently applied a modified version of the RAS Melt Filter into PVC (both soft and hard) recycling, making it the only continuous and automatic filtration solution in that field!
At the same time, Fimic’s filtration system is also being applied to PET recycling, with the first unit being in operation within the first quarter of 2020.
The GEM Melt Filter, presented at last year’s K, is an innovative single-filtration solution to be applied to high-output recycling lines (at big recycling Companies, compounders, etc…) who often need to install more parallel filtration steps to be able to cope with high production needs at contaminated materials at the same time. GEM is avoiding that thus saving on space, investment, down times.
What are you most looking forward to at this years’ show? You attended the launch show in 2018, what did you gain from the experience?
We expect 2020 to be an excellent starting time for an even better market response towards our company and our products. We expect to meet both new but especially existing c ustomers, also from the compounding market.
We think it’s an important appointment which is connecting useful presentations to final customers, focusing on recycling and therefore the perfect target for our company’s activity.
Fimic will be exhibiting at Plastics Recycling World Expo in Essen, Germany, 3 - 4 June at stand B830.
Register for your FREE ticket here!