Coca-Cola Germany invests in KHS glass bottle line for complex sorting optimization

22 Jul 2022 --- Coca-Cola in Germany has invested around €50 million (US$50.8 million) in one of its biggest plants in Mannheim, including a returnable glass line supplied by KHS for optimizing highly complex sorting processes. 

“We fill a total of six different bottles on this line: four in 200 ml and two in 330 ml format,” explains Christopher Bee, plant manager at the Mannheim facility. “The smaller sizes are primarily destined for the hospitality trade, where the packaging has to be a bit more impressive than for retail.”

“This [requirement] is why the Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite and mezzo mix brands on this line have their own respective bottle designs. We process two formats for the bigger containers that are also sold in the retail trade: what’s known as the contour bottle for products in the Coca-Cola family and our green multibottle for Fanta, Sprite and mezzo mix.”

The KHS line sorting system can feed the empty bottles by type for a fully automatic washing and filling process.

“In principle, the sorting and filling processes take place on two separate systems. We use a segment to combine both sections with one another specifically for our main product types, the 200 and 330 ml Coca-Cola bottles. Here, the containers that are largely returned from the market by type are sent straight from sorting to production,” continues Bee.

“They no longer have to take a detour through the “empties” warehouse. This [process] reduces the amount of effort needed for handling.”

The other five product types from the sorting process are first packed into beverage crates and then onto pallets before being temporarily stored until they are filled.Innofill Glass DRS.

Intelligent decrater
Due to the system’s high degree of automation, the only manual task required takes place right at the start of sorting. When the crates arrive, they are scanned from above. If they are found to contain foreign objects such as paper cups or film, the crates cannot be identified. The obstacle must then be removed by hand before the crate can be fed back into the automatic process. 

“The decrater is so intelligent that it places the biggest bottle type on one conveyor,” explains Bee. “The smaller bottles are set down on a different conveyor where they’re separated and guided to different lanes with the help of camera systems and pushers.”

“Here, we aim to manipulate the containers as little as possible: in other words, to ensure that they have very little contact with the machine. In this way, we can keep the risk of something falling over at such high speed to a minimum.”

With an output of up to 66,000 bottles per hour, the sorting system has a greater capacity than the returnable glass line, which can fill a maximum of 60,000 bottles every hour. The system means that Coca-Cola in Mannheim seldom suffers any downtime with its “empties” – even during the peak season.

High flexibility
The irregular return of “empties” often results in peaks, says Bee, for example, after music festivals. “What’s special about this system is that it can individually react to these peaks,” he says. “To facilitate this, during commissioning we ran a live simulation with an external service provider. On the basis of the results, in close cooperation with KHS, we were then able to make a number of optimizations and fine adjustments to the layout that improved performance.”

For Bee, one highlight of the new returnable glass line from KHS is the Innoclean DM double-end bottle washer. “On average, we save up to 40% in water and energy for each filled bottle compared to previous-generation systems,” he highlights.

This saving is enabled by the freshwater control, automatically adjusted to the current machine capacity by a control valve. The new ECO carriers also benefit the energy balance by weighing about a quarter less than the previous bottle pockets and having side openings that permit better rinsing. This feature reduces the amount of caustic and heat carryover and thus the cooling requirement within the machine.

If at any point no “empties” are available, the bottle washer switches to an energy-saving idle state: its new standby mode. To this end, the Liquid Efficiency Spraying System lowers the pressure of the spray pumps to 0.3 bar during downtime and thus cuts electricity consumption by up to 80%.Coca-Cola’s product portfolio in Mannheim, Germany.

Coca-Cola and KHS
Within the Coca-Cola network, Mannheim is the most recent of three major projects for more climate-friendly production that KHS has implemented with CCEP Germany in the last few years.

A canning line for Karlsruhe about 70 km away marked the start of the undertaking in 2015. “This line with its capacity of up to 120,000 cans per hour is convincing with our resource-saving tunnel pasteurizer, for example,” says Robert Fast, project manager at KHS. It uses water collected from the empty can rinser. And the use of ionized air in the process water enables the number of chemicals to be reduced compared to the standard process.”

The packaging machine is just as climate-friendly, he adds, as the gas burner in the shrink tunnel cuts the consumption of electrical energy by up to 75% and carbon emissions by up to 60%.

In 2017, KHS installed a non-returnable PET line with a capacity of up to 42,000 bottles per hour in Mönchengladbach on the Lower Rhine. “One of the reasons we won the contract was our extensive electricity-, water- and gas-saving concept,” says Fast.

“One example of this is the InnoPET Blomax stretch blow molder. The near-infrared technology of the heater, where the preforms are heated upstream of the actual stretch blow molding process, cuts the amount of energy needed.”

Edited by Joshua Poole