A German plastic recycling company has established its main group materials and product research and development centre in the Spanish city of Valencia.
Berlin-based CABKA Group GmbH., which specialises in converting recovered packaging waste into innovative quality products, recently opened the 800m2 facility in Spain, to concentrate R&D resources spread across its various sites.
CABKA selected the Valencia for its innovation centre in part because the group already has a sales office in the city. It also aims to collaborate with the Polytechnic University of Valencia on different research projects and to promote young talent.
As it launched its new research base, the recycler pointed to the pressing need to come up with innovative solutions to tackle the issue of post consumer plastics waste. CABKA believes the challenge is to create new materials to recycle the waste into a range of new quality products.
“Recycled materials are the future and have a lot of potential to offer,” declared the German group's chief operating officer Jörg Schuchalski.
“To take advantage of them, we must constantly ask ourselves how we can optimise our current process materials and technologies. But also, how to find new materials and areas of application,” he added.
CABKA emphasised that creating new material formulations “goes hand in hand with” developing end products specific to the materials used.
In Germany, the firm points out, approximately 60% of all plastic waste is made up of post-consumer packaging refuse, while worldwide, film waste accounts for only around 1.5% of packaging waste recycled.
Key areas of work at the new research centre, located in Valencia's Technological Parc Paterna, will include process automation and internal process technology, CABKA said as it announced the facility's launch.
CABKA was originally formed as Recover System Recycling in 1993 but has operated under its current name since 2006. It has grown by acquisition and today runs eight sites around the globe.
The firm, which employs over 700 workdwide, has production plants in Weira, Germany; Ypres in Belgium; Valencia, Spain and at St Louis, Missouri in the US. CABKA produces a range of recycled materials such as polyolefin, PVC and post-consumer mixed plastics material.
Its end products include material handling items like export pallets, crates, street barrier and sign bases, speed bump sections and drainable outdoor lawn grid flooring systems.