On the third day of the 9th Edition CPRJ Plastics in Packaging Conference and Showcase, a plant visit to Suzhou Unisupply International Co., Ltd. was successfully held.

Established in 2004, Suzhou Unisupply is a manufacturer specializing in packaging containers of fast-consuming food. Due to expanding production scale, the company moved to Fenhu Economic Development District in 2006. Its production site has relocated to a smart manufacturing area in Lili Town, Wujiang District since August 2008.

The current plant covers an area of 40,000 square meters with the production workshop occupying an area of 23,000 square meters. The investment was RMB 200 million.

The roof is equipped with solar crystal panels, on which there are smart bird repellents and small cleaning robots. Environmentally friendly clean energy is used for supplying 2.5 million kWh of electricity per year to the factory. 

The Industry 4.0 plant is equipped with automatic feeding system, smart extrusion workshop, smart molding workshop and smart warehouse.

Outside the factory, there are 6 giant metal tanks with a height of 15 meters, a diameter of 3.5 meters, and a volume of 100 cubic meters. Each can store 70 tons of raw materials for the production of 20 million fast food boxes.

The operation in the extrusion workshop turns raw material flakes into sheets through heating and melting. The sheets are then produced as rolls and put into storage by the AGV smart autonomous vehicle system. It is an entirely intelligent and automated process.

The AGV smart autonomous vehicle system delivers the required sheets to the molding machine guided by the MES control system. The molding machine will produce the lunch boxes based on the system instructions.

After the cutting procedure, there are some material wastes. These wastes are processed in an automatic crusher for reuse and sent to 20 temporary storage tanks through pipelines.

The storage tanks sort the reused materials to make sure they can be correctly selected by smart feeding machine during another production process. This guarantees the full use of materials, production safety and hygiene.

The lunch boxes then go through several times of inspection before being packed and transported to the smart warehouse.

The smart warehouse, covering an area of 2,400 square meters, can handle 150,000 boxes of finished products. As per Suzhou Unisupply, its daily peak delivery volume reaches 15,000 boxes, occupying 10,000 square meters of a normal flat warehouse. Therefore, the smart warehouse helps cost saving in terms of construction cost.