The South Africa’s leading canmaking firm is planning to reintroduce aluminium
beverage cans to the domestic market after a gap of more than a decade, says by the managing director of Nampak Bevcan .
The Cape has long been regarded as a bastion of tinplate D&I beverage cans, but following customer pressure and the economics of available tinplate coils, Smuts says Nampak is making the move to take advantage of the latest aluminium specifications.
Smuts told The Canmaker that the new high-speed 1.2 billion cans a year aluminium line will be installed in the footprint of a former line that had that had been decommissioned many years ago.
“The ‘change’ to aluminium is definitely based on customer pressure, but also because of the fact that we did not have access to wide CA D&I material, as used by the other steel can manufacturers,” said Smuts. “The move to aluminium offers us the opportunity to use world class aluminium specifications and therefore also allows us to down gauge to more competitive levels.”
The new manufacturing line – capable of running at up to 2,700cpm – will be built within Nampak’s Springs plant and is expected to start up in April 2013. Much of the process equipment is being supplied from the UK by CMB Engineering.
Springs is one of four Nampak beverage can plants – the others are at Cape Town, Durban, and Rosslyn – with a total of seven lines and an estimated capacity of 3.5bn cans a year. Two of the plants, Cape Town and Rosslyn, also make two-piece D&I steel food cans.
South Africa’s only previous aluminium D&I line was built by Rheem at Wadeville in 1993. It was converted to tinplate in 1999 but business declined and was closed in 2000, after which it was sold to Latasa in Brazil.His most recent expansion has been with a plant built in Angola, the country’s first, which was opened officially in June 2011 with a capacity of 750m.The line is currently running very well and is running to capacity.
