Krones & innocent to build a CO2-neutral bottling plant

Following long years of contract-bottling, the smoothie and juice producer innocent has decided to build the very first bottling plant of its own in the Port of Rotterdam. Innocent is over 90% owned by the Coca-Cola company. Krones won the order for four complete PET bottling lines and the corresponding IT landscape. Krones is a German packaging and bottling machine manufacturer. It produces lines for filling beverages in plastic and glass bottles or beverage cans. In addition, the company also manufactures stretch blow-molding machines for producing polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, plus fillers, labelers, bottle washers, pasteurizers, inspectors, packers, and palletizers. The paramount consideration for “the blender”, as innocent has christened its greenfield project, was sustainability — the aim is to build an entirely CO2-neutral factory. “But we’re also keen to reduce water consumption to a minimum, since we want to treat and re-use as much of it as possible,” explains Sam Woollett, Engineering and Facilities lead. Krones said each of the four identical PET lines handles up to 32,000 containers an hour. The new plant has been tasked with filling about 400 million bottles of…

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