T-BONE’S SIZZLING SALES PITCH
A NEW sustainable food packaging hub is being established in Wales.
A £2m financial investment from the Welsh Government will help the facility at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre Cymru (AMRC Cymru) in Broughton.
AMRC Cymru, Welsh Government’s £20m R&D facility in north Wales, has secured the funding to develop an emerging technology demonstrator specifically for the Welsh food and drink sector that will accelerate the adoption of waste-reducing eco-innovations by integrating technologies in the packaging industry.
Lesley Griffiths, Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs, said: “Our ambition is to raise Wales’ international profile and proactively market our innovation in quality food and drink to the world. I believe the innovations we are exploring at AMRC Cymru can deliver a range of measures to future-proof the industry in Wales.
“We want to see the food, drink and packaging industry reducing its reliance on manual labour and increasing skill levels within the sector and are extremely interested in exploring innovation in processes. This will drive forward the industry into a new era of green growth in the Welsh economy and it is vital the sector responds to these high potential opportunities. This can only be achieved by urgently developing new processes and incorporating the new technologies to tackle single-use plastic and recycling.”
AMRC Cymru’s operations director, Jason Murphy, said: “The conversion of our facility to producing medical ventilators since March has unfortunately delayed the completion of the Food and Drink Packaging Sustainability Centre. However, that delay has given us the time to model the demonstrator virtually and consider how we can best set it up so that visiting SMEs can gain the most from it. This will hopefully be one of our key strength areas at AMRC Cymru and nearly all of our engineers here in Broughton will be working on aspects of the demonstrator. Ideally, we would like to be able to invite visitors in to see it sometime in 2021.”