One of the leading Italian companies in the management of industrial wastes, HASI (HERAmbiente Servizi Industriali), and Aliplast, a leading company in Veneto in plastic recovery and recycling, are part of the HERAmbiente Group. The two companies interact synergistically in the service of customers in various production sectors. Their joint venture regards the management of projects to reduce inefficient materials use and extract value from wastes. One of the companies served by the two companies is Granarolo, a group of primary importance in the dairy sector, which entrusts management of its industrial wastes to the HERAmbiente Group.
One of the leading Italian companies in the management of industrial wastes, HASI (HERAmbiente Servizi Industriali), and Aliplast, a leading company in Veneto in plastic recovery and recycling, are part of the HERAmbiente Group. The two companies interact synergistically in the service of customers in various production sectors. Their joint venture regards the management of projects to reduce inefficient materials use and extract value from wastes. One of the companies served by the two companies is Granarolo, a group of primary importance in the dairy sector, which entrusts management of its industrial wastes to the HERAmbiente Group.
The joint venture provides services in a variety of sectors, including food, beverages, manufacturing, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. HASI provides all environmental services to support the management and optimization of industrial waste treatment, recovering as much as possible for reuse and, where possible, streamlining the client’s production process through upstream improvement plans.
Freeing medium and small companies from the waste problem is one of HASI’s primary objectives. We are talking about industrial wastes that represent about 80% of total wastes in Italy, wastes that demand highly professional waste management systems coupled with high efficiency, state-of-the-art treatment plants.
HASI boasts 17 industrial waste treatment plants: passivation plants, chemical-physical treatment plants, soil washing, and the F3 waste-to-energy plant in Ravenna. They are integrated with 8 Aliplast plants, including collection systems and specialized plastic waste recycling plants to produce a marketable product.
In many cases, full integration along the entire plastic lifecycle allows Aliplast to offer its clients closed-loop solutions. The company’s system, the first of its kind in Italy, is based on a capillary collection network covering all of Italy, which allows it to recover more than 65% of its post-consumer LDPE packaging. The closed loop is a circular process: Aliplast produces and sells packaging materials that the clients use to package their products. At the end of the lifecycle, the company recovers these materials from the waste stream and regenerates them in a continuing cycle.
The Granarolo experience
One of the groups that works with HASI and Aliplast is Granarolo, a Bologna-based company that is a leading producer of milk and other dairy products. The company has worked with Aliplast since 2004 for its plants in Bologna, Gioia del Colle (Bari), and Soliera (Modena) and with HASI since 2014 with the implementation of the turnkey Global Waste Management (GWM) service. This service manages all industrial wastes produced by three Granarolo facilities: Bologna, Coriano (Rimini), and Soliera (Modena).
More than just waste treatment, GWM is an entire package of high-value services for large industrial firms and multi-site enterprises, including production process optimization, reduction in production scrap, legislative consulting, environmental auditing, and chemical analyses. Granarolo, operating in line with its sustainability plan, with performance assessed annually in the Group’s Sustainability Balance Sheet, has chosen to work with HERAmbiente Group to reduce the environmental impact of its processes. The objective is to significantly reduce the quantity of industrial wastes produced and give a new life to those that are produced.
Since 2004, Aliplast has provided solutions to Granarolo for the collection and recycling of PET bottles and preforms, PELD films, and other plastic scrap. The later synergy with HASI and the acquisition of the GWM service have led to further performance improvements entailing the recovery of almost all scrap produced.
The GWM service allows Granarolo to manage hazardous wastes, non-hazardous wastes, mixed packaging, and production scrap. But most importantly, it provides high-value services tailored to the needs of each individual plant (waste sorting, dedicated project management, partnerships with qualified suppliers, and supply chain improvement plans).
The achieved results include: reduction of unsorted wastes by 80%, and recovery and remarketing of 100% of plastic scrap.
In these seven years of collaboration, the Bologna group has reduced production of unsorted wastes by 80%. Furthermore, in 2020 it recovered more than 95% of the wastes produced by its plants thanks to optimized integrated scrap management.
As regards its own activity, in 2020 Aliplast collected nearly 85 tons of PET bottles and preforms, 15 tons of PELD film, and 10 tons of other scrap produced by the Soliera, Gioia del Colle, and Bologna plants, for a total of 110 tons that was all recycled and remarketed as recycled plastic packaging.
Furthermore, the collaboration between HASI and Granarolo further developed in 2020, with the implementation of the Operation & Maintenance (O&M) service for the wastewater treatment plant for the Bologna facility. O&M is another high-value service in the GWM package, which consists of on-site operation and maintenance of private waste and wastewater treatment plants, with dedicated personnel, supporting the client’s production cycle and complemented by planning of improvement/upgrade measures and/or by the construction of new treatment plants customized to client needs.
