Avaliação ambiental e econômica do processo de embalagem de utilidades domésticas a partir da abordagem de produção mais limpa

Abstract

The generation of waste in a process should be avoided, both for economic and environmental reasons , because waste is composed of raw materials that have not become a product. In this sense, the present work seeks to evaluate improvement opportunities through the Cleaner Production (CP) environmental tool in order to reduce the amount of waste generated in the packaging process of a company Gama located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. This process uses as a raw material bioriented polypropylene film (BOPP), a thermoplastic polymer resulting from the biaxial orientation of the polypropylene film (PP). These films are produced and sold by the company Alfa in the form of reels for the company Beta that do the printing and then sell them. The packaging process is carried out on the horizontal packers of the Flow Pack machines that provide the heat sealing of the film. In the company there are six machines of this type that together generated in the year 2016, on average, 900kg of packaging waste of BOPP. In this study two machines were defined to be studied and identified according to the year of manufacture: Flow Pack 84 and Flow Pack 07. From the on-site evaluation of the process in both machines, the main causes of waste generation were identified: Disruption of the film, lack of material, locked material, misaligned material and inadequate sealing. The statistical analysis by contingency table and the Pareto diagram showed the main failures, those that should be addressed with priority: lack of material for Flow Pack 07 and material locked for Flow Pack 84. It was also verified that Flow Pack 84 generated almost three times more packaging waste when compared to Flow Pack 07. Thus, CP actions were defined in order to reduce or eliminate waste in the generating source. With the installation of a lung treadmill and two stop sensors in the Flow Pack 84 it would be possible to eliminate the generation of waste by stucked materials, because when some material stuck into the machine the sensor would identify and interrupt the process. As for Flow Pack 07 the lack of material does not depend on the machine itself, but on the quality of the material that is fed into it, so, it is a problem that must be solved before the packaging process. The economic viability analysis performed through simple PayBack showed that the investment made with the changes would be recovered in just over a year. With the improvement of the process, the generation of packaging waste would be reduced by 63,4% in Flow Pack 84 and consequently the negative environmental impacts caused not only by the packaging process but also by the entire BOPP production chain would be reduced.