The privately owned Norwegian company Elopak (PO Box 124, N-3431 Spikkestad; www.elopak.com) is setting up a “hole through the wall” blow moulding operation in the UK with Lancashire Dairies, based in Manchester. GBP 2m will be spent on blow moulding equipment from the Italian company Techne to provide a capacity for up to 75 million HDPE bottles a year.

Elopak, which has a staff in excess of 2,000 and a 1999 turnover of EUR 528m, is a leading supplier of liquid food packaging systems, principally its Pure-Pak system. It has previously supplied Lancashire Dairies with two filling systems – a P-S70 machine and a P-S90 ultra clean system – for Pure-Pak containers up to one litre in size. However, this is its first venture into the plastic dairy packaging market in the UK.

Elopak unveiled plans to enter the PET and HDPE bottle market for dairy products last year. Its first success was announced in April with a EUR 2.5m project for PET bottles with the OLMA dairy in the Czech Republic, for which it has supplied all machinery and materials from blow moulding equipment and a filling machine to PET preforms, caps and labels. It has also supplied four full time staff to run the blow moulding machines on the OLMA site in Olomouc. The plant is planned to have an annual production output of up to 20 million milk drink and drinking yoghurt containers, in three sizes up to one litre.

Kim Potter, director plastic bottle systems, Elopak Plastic Division, said the OLMA project was one of many planned for 2001. It was completed in five months, is based on the Swiss Mag-Plastic technology and is already producing 100,000 bottles daily. He added: “Our target is to have a total capacity of around 225 million plastic containers by the end of the year in installations across the globe.”