Herma partially opens its new coating plant

The key components of the new plant have been brought into service step by step. This enabled the company at a very early stage, upon the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, to distribute production orders among its various facilities and guarantee its employees even better protection.

“In consequence, we are now operating two entirely autonomous plants. In other words, the availability of duplicated systems maintains our ability to fulfil orders, even if production needs to be suspended in one of the plants,’ said Sven Schneller, one of the managing directors of the self-adhesive materials division at Herma.

The remainder of the new plant, expected to open in the summer, will increase Herma’s annual self-adhesive material capacity by 50 percent, to 1.2 billion square meters. The technical resources of the new facility will enable producing innovative adhesive materials, including materials for shipping labels which, by dispensing entirely with a liner, are especially kind to the environment and film labels produced largely or exclusively from recovered raw materials.

With its automated guided vehicles, the packing robots, and a pioneering energy policy, the new coating plant is said to likely be the most efficient of its kind.

‘Thanks to a special combined cooling, heat and power plant, Herma can dramatically reduce its primary energy consumption in the new facility. While highly sophisticated from a technical perspective and giving rise to a slightly extended construction period, it enables us to generate up to one-quarter of the electricity that we consume,’ commented Dr Thomas Baumgärtner, one of the managing directors of the self-adhesive materials division at Herma. ‘In addition, we use the heat produced by power generation for heating purposes in the wintertime, and during the summer we use it very efficiently to provide the energy needed for cooling.’

The company also perceives automated production and logistics processes as vital as the rolls of paper, film or coated label stock produced in this plant can be as much as two meters wide and weigh almost five tones. The automated guided vehicles carrying the rolls are being deployed here for the first time in the industry. The driverless fleet consists of ten vehicles which, when loaded, are roughly the size of a large commercial van.