Extrusion International USA 1-2022

25 Extrusion International 1/2022 New Location „ Just under a year ago, the EREMA Group started to repurpose the premises of Gruber & Kaja in St. Marien, which they took over as a reserve site in January 2021. In the meantime, a lot is going on there. “When this site came up for sale, it only took us a few days to decide to buy the 40,000m² plot, including the workshop hall, which has an area of 15,000m²,” says Manfred Hackl, CEO of EREMA Group GmbH. Around EUR 20 million was invested in the purchase, as the site offered the opportunity to increase production capacity by 60 percent in the immediate vicinity of the company headquarters in Ansfelden. The fact that this site is now already being used so in- tensively was not envisaged at the time, because at the end of 2020 the company was just completing the ex- pansion to their headquarters in Ansfelden, involving an investment of around EUR 17 million. 20 new jobs have already been created as a result, with a further 30 to follow in the next few months. By the time the new site is completed, the total number of new jobs will be up to 150. This development is due to the high demand for the EREMA Group’s plastics recycling technologies and the trend towards ever-larger recycling plants. “Just in December, we delivered a VACUREMA ® system to Brazil that will produce up to 40,000 metric tonnes of recycled PET (rPET) per year. That is equivalent to re- cycling around 1.1 billion 1.5-litre PET bottles. This site provides the perfect conditions for building this scale of machine,” says Hackl. Since January 2021, part of the existing office and hall space at Kunststoffstraße 1, as the site’s address is now called, has been occupied by companies and depart- EREMA Group www.erema.com ments of EREMA . UMAC, a subsidiary specialising in ser- vicing and trading previously owned recycling machines, which was severely short of space at its main location in Styria, moved its entire production and administra- tion to St. Marien. Large areas of hall storage space were adapted for both UMAC and EREMA. The paint shop was also relocated from Ansfelden to St. Marien, and another hall was equipped for building large-scale VACUREMA ® systems. Production in this workshop is now being ramped up step by step. From the left: Walter Lazelsberger Mayor of St. Marien, Michael Heitzinger Managing Director EREMA GmbH, Markus Stölnberger Managing Director UMAC GmbH, Markus Achleitner Upper Austria´s Minister for the Economy, Markus Huber- Lindinger Managing Director EREMA GmbH and Manfred Hackl CEO EREMA Group GmbH Functions in Customer Portal Added „ The Swiss trading group Meraxis has further expanded its digital customer portal for the procurement of prime and recycled materials: Effective immediately, custom- ers can send material requests and place and manage their orders directly in the “Meraxis Customer Portal”. “The digital solution significantly simplifies the entire procurement process for our customers and, above all, saves them valuable time,” says Michael Grysczyk, Head of Digital & Disruptive Business at Meraxis. “The portal can be accessed around the clock, giving buyers the flex- ibility they need in their day-to-day work. Of course, our professional sales consultants are still available to all customers.” Meraxis is one of the first plastics distributors to offer such a customer portal. Here, users get a 360° overview of current and past material requests, offers, and orders. In addition, delivery times, delivery statuses, documents, invoices and payment statuses are displayed. Buyers can create new requests in a few steps. For this purpose, old- er inquiries can be copied and adapted if necessary. The central portal also provides access to up-to-date market data and raw material price developments. “Our customer portal bundles all relevant data and documents and thus creates full transparency,” says Oliver Zehnder, product manager for the customer por- tal. “For longer-term contracts, the digital platform also shows our customers their monthly raw material con- sumption and the volumes still open until the end of the contract.” Meraxis Group www.meraxis-group.com