For recycling equipment maker Pure Loop GmbH, it just feels right to be back on the Fakuma show floor.
The doors had barely opened on the first day of Fakuma and Managing Director Manfred Dobersberger was already chatting up people at the company’s booth as the show awakened.
For Dobersberger, leading Pure Loop through the pandemic has been a challenge. But not one without opportunity.
“Everything is related with corona. I would say from our point of view, at the moment, the market is booming,” he said. “There is no doubt about it.”
Pure Loop, a unit of Erema Group, certainly has had difficulty engaging potential new customers since early 2020. But market forces are allowing the company to maintain sales of new machinery to existing customers at a healthy pace allowing for continued growth, Dobersberger said.
So being back at Fakuma, which was canceled last October due to the virus, brings renewed hope to the managing director to connect with new people.
“Finding new customers was a little more difficult because the platforms, the shows [and] the speeches we couldn’t make out there were just missing,” he said. “So where we could attract customers we didn’t know or they didn’t know us, that was a bit of a challenge.
“But we took the time and looked into alternative markets. And, I think, is a good part for us,” he said.
Pure Loop had just started looking into the clothing industry as a potential market for its recycling machinery when COVID-19 struck early last year. What the company found was up to 50 percent of the PE fibers created for clothing can get lost in the supply chain from manufacturing to conversion into clothing to sales. This means there is plenty of PE available for recapture using Pure Loop’s technology.
Pure Loop is promoting its ISEC evo line of equipment, which the company describes as a “material all-rounder” that can recycle different types and shapes of material. ISEC evo, Dobersberger said, shreds, melts, extrudes and pelletizes production waste in one integrated unit.