TRANSFORMING WASTE into a resource: this is the corporate mission of Vetreco, a company that operates in Supino, in the province of Frosinone, in the scrap glass processing sector, converting it into a secondary raw material (the so-called Pronto Al Forno, or PAF, combined with glass sand) that can be used directly in the furnaces of glasshouses for the production of hollow glass (glass bottles, jars and containers). “The company was born in 2010 from a joint venture between three of the most important international hollow glass manufacturing groups (Ardagh Glass, Verallia and Zignago Vetro), with the aim of purchasing and converting glass cullet into ready-to-furnace and glass sand, then supplying it mainly to the production plants of the three companies,” explains Enrico Coccoli, Vetreco Srl’s Operations Director. Over the years, the Supino plant, strategically located close to the Ferentino motorway exit, in an area of almost 60,000 square metres, has increased its production capacity from the initial 200,000 tonnes/year to the current 400,000 tonnes/year of processable cullet; the numbers are large, as is the catchment area, about 700 municipalities served with 9 million inhabitants involved, making Vetreco one of the largest in the sector and the largest in Central and Southern Italy.
The technologies used at the site to transform cullet into PAF are state-of-the-art, the result of major investments amounting to over EUR 20 million: crushing mills, screens, drying systems, optical sorting machines, machines for separating the glass from the other components in the cullet, and automated transport systems. These assets allow a sorting of approximately 91 % of PAF and glass sand, so for every 100 tonnes of cullet, only 9 % (2022 figures) is delivered as waste to the platforms serving the site. An effective example of a circular economy, which combines the entrepreneurial need to govern production costs with the desire to make the hollow glass production process increasingly sustainable from an environmental point of view, both by saving significant quantities of m3 of gas and by avoiding the emission of huge quantities of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, and finally by avoiding the use of many tonnes of primary raw materials.
Vetreco is not only an example of green economy, but also a factory where, in addition to the achievement of three important certifications, ISO 9001 (quality), ISO 14001 (environment) and ISO 45001 (safety), they work daily on the continuous improvement of the process, both in terms of efficiency and sustainability. “The latter is a value that is fully shared by our shareholders, and a basic element for the best possible coexistence with the inhabitants of our settlement area and the local communities,” Coccoli emphasises.
PROJECTS Projects are underway to reduce energy consumption, as well as to produce energy from renewable sources (Vetreco has joined the ‘Helios Valley’ project for the decarbonisation of the Frosinone industrial district, promoted by SGI in cooperation with the Lazio Industrial Consortium, the University of Cassino, Engie and several companies in the Frosinone industrial district); an equally important focus is on further decreasing the fraction of scrap glass that is currently not recovered, with the ambitious but not impossible goal of ‘zero unrecovered waste’, and in this sense, collaborations are being defined with the University of Salerno, in addition to launching projects with WCM (World Class Manufacturing) methodology.
SAFETY AT WORK ‘At Vetreco,’ adds the operations manager, ‘we also work strongly in the area of health and safety, convinced that these are aspects that must become an integral and fundamental part of the working and entrepreneurial culture; even in this case, the numbers are ‘great’, more than 2,300 days without accidents, but these must not induce us to lower our guard, on the contrary, they must push us to be even more careful in prevention, especially through the strong involvement of all employees’. To this end, last March the company organised the event ‘Safety … but not only’, which saw the participation of organisations, public and private institutions, as well as all the people who work in the company; it was an opportunity to share the results obtained, but also to discuss health and environmental issues, always with a view to continuous and active involvement. “In short,’ concludes Enrico Coccoli, ‘at Vetreco we have the goal of becoming an excellence in the scrap glass processing sector, both from the point of view of industrial results and in terms of the sustainability of our process; the team is already at work on this and we are truly convinced that, as our slogan says, glass is ‘an infinite journey”.
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