Alpine Is Focusing on Efficiency, Sustainability, While Pushing for Better Recycling Infrastructure

When you walk into Hosokawa Alpine’s booth during a trade show, you’re actually entering a show within a show. And holding court is David Nunes, the long-time president of Hosokawa Alpine American who joined the company in 1987.

Nunes bleeds Alpine blue. And his passion about blown film and the technology his company produces for this market has not diminished an iota over his 37-plus year career in the industry. Nunes at his best is surrounded by customers, walking them through his booth, focusing on their pain points, while fervently illustrating how his company can help solve their problems, and occasionally bumping into a plastics magazine journalist innocently eavesdropping on the whole conversation. In a 30-minute conversation with Nunes, you’ll get an opinion or two, maybe a joke and, if you’re really lucky, an impression. If you tell him you can afford to buy an Alpine line, he’ll likely quip, “You can’t afford not to buy an Alpine.”

But his abilities to entertain notwithstanding, make no mistake that Nunes is dead serious about helping his customers become more efficient and profitable, and how investing in innovative technology can help them do just that. In an article that appeared in the NPE2018 Official Show Daily, he said, “What we tell our customers is simply this: ‘Don’t fall in love with your assets. They don’t love you back. In fact, they hold you back.”

He is also an advocate of the  “incremental capacity” formula, which he says he heard first from long-time film extrusion executive Bill Seanor, now CEO of Overwraps Packaging. Nunes explains: “Let’s say you have a line running at a rate of X lb/yr., and you invest in technology that gets you 1 million lbs more. In that scenario, your only incremental cost is resin. So, whatever your spread is between your cost of resin and your sales price per pound goes straight to the bottom line. The math is really simple.”

As part of the machine builder’s effort to improve its customers’ efficiency and bottom line, Nunes and Alpine of late have been focusing on machine direction orientation (MDO) technology to help film producers improve yield and properties, its patented X-Die, the VarDar variable-diameter air ring and the Select extruder line, which is said to be flexible enough to run LLDPE, mLLDPE, PCR (postcustomer recyclate) and bioplastics.

But front of mind at Alpine is developing solutions to help its customers automate. Says Nunes, “For many years the Flexible Packaging Association would survey its membership asking them to identify their biggest concern. And every time hundreds of film producers would say resin, ether supply or price. That’s not surprising, because material is the number one cost for a film producer. But especially since COVID, more film producers are identifying labor as their biggest concern. So, as a machine builder, we’re focusing a lot on automation. This really starts with the control systems, and we’re constantly making them more intuitive.” 

He continues, “But as much as we try to automate, these lines do not really run by themselves. You also need qualified people to operate and maintain this equipment. Our control systems now give operators more tools to troubleshoot. With one touch, they can call up a recipe from a prior run to more easily get into production. We now provide automated slitting knives that require no operator intervention.” 

Nunes also advocates training as a means to help companies retain the operators they still employ. He explains, “We are doing much more than we ever have including training as part of our control systems, where operators can call up machine components and get advice and processing tips. And we’re working to integrate video into our controls.” Nunes says Alpine has a group of its young engineers working on training tools that simulate the blown film process. 

On the matter of sustainability, while Alpine is developing technology to help its customers go green, he’s concerned about the nascient state of the recycling infrastructure. He states, “Every year billions of pounds of flexible packaging are produced, whether it's towel and tissue overwrap or shrink bundling films or industrial packaging, and hundreds of other applications that are only polyethylene — made of carbon and hydrogen materials. And today they are not being recycled at anywhere near the rate they could be because there is no infrastructure in place. And now, in the name of sustainability, we are pushing monomaterial structures for standup pouches because they are recyclable. But again, there isn’t enough infrastructure in place to do this effectively.”

The Alpine executive is not particularly optimistic the circular economy can be sustained without big business getting involved. “Almost every day someone is getting a package from some e-commerce retailer,” Nunes says. “Wouldn’t it be great if one of these companies set up a system where after they drop off the new shipment, they picked up the packaging materials from the shipment they delivered the other day. Think of how quickly that will add up. Whatever company does that will be a hero.” 

At NPE2024, Nunes will be joined by colleagues Jim Campbell, Jay Ragusa and Bob Hitches, among others. Combined, the four amigos have more than 130 years of Alpine experience. Over the years, Nunes has brought “a talented group” of  young blood into the company in sales, marketing and engineering roles. Nunes is bullish on their ability to “sustain and improve on Alpine’s commitment to excellence.”