Selene points on the ‘sustainable quality’.

Interview to Valter Severini, the CEO of Selene Spa.

Well, for a company that has been producing PE packaging since sixty years, speaking about sustainability is completely natural. Selene, as the leading Italian company in the flexible  industrial packaging production, has dealt with this topic for at least ten years and today has started a new project with the opening of a new production plant dedicated to the used raw materials recovery and recycling. 

Let’s start to know the company better by talking to CEO Valter Severini.
 

Severini, could you please speak about your company?

Selene is a company that belongs to my family since its foundation.  Today  thanks to our  experience gained over sixty years, we can provide  a sustainable and integrated range of products and solutions for industrial products of flexible packaging. Over time we have developed an important know-how concerning blown film extrusion technologies, flexographic printing and we have also dealt with the entire theme of production chain by preparing a circular economy model that extends the life cycle of products and creates partnership in the market segments served. Our idea of circular economy is to give value to plastic waste and used packaging materials for a more integrated vision of supply that is fully  compatible with environment. 

How did you actually develop this theme?

We  recently launched  the NextBag™ project on the market: a sustainable production process for industrial packaging that, by recycling PE materials, aims to drastically reduce the extraction of fossil products addressed to  the production of virgin plastic, limiting CO2 emissions considerably.

NextBag™ develops concretely the theme of circular production by the use of three supply chain phases:

1. recovery and selection of used packaging materials

2. recycling of high quality raw materials

3. reuse of the same raw material to produce new packaging

Briefly we are focusing  everything on the concept of “sustainable quality” with a minimum impact on the environment and the best result in terms of packaging performance. Thanks to a mixed of experiences and experimentation during these years and the use of technologies dedicated to our project  in a new plant recently opened, we  achieved this goal today. PRP – the Premium Recycled Polymer– is the summary of all our efforts.

Are you speaking about recycled raw material?

Of course! But we are not speaking about any recycled polymer,  the PRP is the accurate result of the first two phases of the process: it is a particular recovered and selected raw material with such quality characteristics similar to 100% virgin polymers.  Our PRP, to be declared as PRP, must have passed  a series of strict controls and checks and accurate measurements made by the SQR – Selene Quality Recycling – laboratory.  PRP is used in the medium layer of Selene coextrusion for the production of any type of  packaging in NextBag™ version and it can guarantee durability, functionality and performance. Today, we can obtain FFS-tube  with 30% and 50% of PRP – but in short we will reach up to 80% reducing even the thickness up to 40%.

In other words,  is this what you mean speaking about “sustainable quality”?

Absolutely! I mean our effort has been focused on producing sustainable packaging, within a circular process, that on the one hand can guarantee performances and on the other can be destined to a life cycle that can reach up to 10 reuses. This really represents a concrete response to the needs of our planet as well as accepting  the commitment of the CIRCULAR PLASTIC ALLIANCE which aims to reach 10 million tons of recycled plastic by 2025 for production of new products.

Thanks to our experience gained and the know-how of our markets we can think that there are others margins to optimize the offer that Selene can make to our increasing number of customers.

Which  actions will you intend to take in the coming years?

Well, the way is somehow traced, we will pursuit our growth giving priority to high sustainability projects and  technological contents. Our mission is to contribute on preserving natural resources and improving the quality life thanks to sustainable processes, products and solutions for waste management and  optimization of the markets served, sharing also value creation with our business partners, society and  environment.