Food grade endless winding belts for producing paper drinking straws
Nitta Industries Europe has introduced its seamless winding belts for manufacturing environmentally friendly drinking straws from paper.
The newly developed belt, entitled SE-XA-PGG-F, has a substantially extended lifetime, so belts do not have to be replaced so often. The belt is manufactured with FDA rubber, fulfilling the needs of the food and beverage industries.
The Council of the European Union adopted a directive for reducing single-use plastic products in May 2019, including paper.
As over 36 billion plastic straws are used every year in the EU, over 7 million kilometres of non-recyclable plastic waste is produced. The German Ministry for the Environment confirms that plastic straws are among the major polluting items in the world’s oceans. The industry has until 2021 to implement the directive in full.
Today, most manufacturers of paper straws use machines in which multiple paper webs are wound around a mandrel using a belt. The drawback in this process is the very short lifetime of the belt, which can be as short as one day. The downtime for the paper straw machinery due to frequent belt changes results in higher production costs compared with plastic.
By their nature, straws have small diameters, resulting in increased bending for the belt and high abrasion to the belt surface by the paper. Additionally, the belt must cope with a high load from the stationary mandrel around which the paper is wound during the manufacturing process.
The Research and Development department at Nitta developed a seamless belt, to assist performance in paper straw production.
Nitta’s winding belt SE-XA-PGG-F has a rubber cover – a compound that meets the extraction limits specified in the FDA 21 CFR177.2600 for rubber articles in contact with aqueous and fatty foods.
“For manufacturers of paper drinking straws, the longer service life of the belts means lower cost of ownership,” said Michael Planz, sales manager for Nitta Industries Europe in Düsseldorf, Germany. “The demand for paper drinking straws is expected to rise dramatically in early 2021, and the production capacities currently available will not be able to satisfy it. This development will benefit those businesses which are prepared to explore new paths with innovative products and solutions first. Nitta has just the right belt for this.”