DANPLAST

Founded in 1968 and based in Buttrio, Danplast was born to produce plastic bags. The activity involves the bubble extrusion of the polythene (PE) and the subsequent welding and cutting phase with consequent packaging of the bag. Initially the reference market was that of the furniture industry, with particular attention to the local and known “chair triangle”, which begins to require this item both for protection and for anti-dust functions. Nowadays, the company applications cover also the production of bags and shoppers in PE, and of packages for food industry, from virgin PE as well as regenerated and Bio PE.

Food packaging is generally based on PE virgin materials. Danplast is developing a new material that will include recycled PE granules into the material composition for food packaging, as a way to reuse and recycle it. The main challenge is to optimize PE film production strategies to obtain a recycled polymer suitable for food-packaging applications, having morpho-chemical characteristics competitive with the virgin material.

Different PE films were characterized from a chemical point of view by two complementary vibrational spectroscopy techniques: infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy. Distinctive features at the micron scale level were revealed for blended PE films, to be associated with the production method.