Italian packaging manufacture specialist Sitma has made available its skills, machinery and workforce to package a supply of over 30.0000 masks for the Municipalities of Castelvetro and Vignola, in the district of Modena, northern Italy.
The gesture assumes further relevance given that Sitma is the first company to pack masks with paper. The packaging paper is supplied by UPM Specialty Papers, recognized for sustainable flexible packaging papers, with which Sitma is developing various R&D projects.
Operate globally without forgetting your roots
Sitma Machinery, which a little over a month ago mourned the death of its founder Aris Ballestrazzi to Covid-19, has jumped into action to support the fight against coronavirus in a concrete and sustainable way, while respecting all rules and regulations to protect employee health. Among the existing projects, the company made itself available to package with paper – free of charge – a first stock of more than 30.000 masks for the municipalities of Castelvetro and Vignola, in the Modena area, to be then distributed to the population.
“This is a project with great symbolic value, of which I am sure Aris Ballestrazzi would have been particularly proud,” said Fabrizio Della Casa, general manager of Sitma.
“Ours is a company with a strong international vocation – so much so that most of our trade takes place abroad. At the same time, however, Sitma has always maintained a very close link with its territory. In a time like this, it therefore seemed logical to put ourselves at the disposal of the community offering concrete support. ”
Addressing the emergency with the environment in mind
The company has thought not only about the health emergency, but also the environmental one. Today, masks are a primary necessity in the global context. Their mass distribution, combined with the collapse in oil prices and the relative cost of the plastic products derived from it, can lead to a real environmental risk deriving from the disposal of billions of units.
“Sitma has for years embraced the path of sustainability, investing heavily in the creation of cutting-edge solutions with a low environmental impact,” Della Casa continued. “For example, we were among the first to develop packaging systems that used paper instead of plastic. It therefore seemed logical to apply this principle to the mask project. Products packaged individually with paper, such as our masks, can in fact be thrown away, together with the label, into the waste paper collection, making it easy and safe to dispose of them.”
An international partnership to support the local community
Specifically, the masks are manually fed and then automatically packaged individually with paper. The paper is produced by UPM Specialty Papers, which specializes in creating high-quality sustainable flexible packaging papers . The package also bears a label, applied with a Bizerba apparatus, that is once again made of sustainable material. The completely recyclable product is supplied by UPM group company Raflatac. The Sitma machine is also sanitized before and after the production phases, to guarantee a process that is not only sustainable but safe.
