In the workshop at three o'clock in the morning, Chen Feng, the director of the frozen food factory, stared at the damaged packaging boxes piled up on the assembly line with a frown. The newly purchased biodegradable lunch boxes frequently burst on the traditional food packaging machines, and the loss rate of each batch of goods is as high as 12%. "Environmental protection regulations require a comprehensive switch to biodegradable materials next year, but the equipment transformation cost is high and the cycle is long. Do we really have to stop the line for three months?" This thought kept him awake all night.
With the implementation of the EU's ban on disposable plastics and the domestic "dual carbon" policy, food companies are forced to accelerate the upgrade of packaging materials. However, the melting point and ductility of degradable materials such as PLA and straw fiber are very different from those of traditional plastics, which directly leads to problems such as loose sealing and film jamming. The technical director of a baking chain brand admitted: "We tested 6 types of environmentally friendly lunch boxes, and the heat sealing pass rate of traditional food packaging machines was less than 60%." In the ply-pack laboratory, engineers are conducting extreme tests on a modified food packaging machine. The AI vision system equipped with the equipment can automatically identify the surface texture of the material and match the optimal heat sealing temperature and pressure curve within 0.3 seconds. When the PLA lunch box passes through the conveyor belt, the heat sealing knife temperature automatically drops from the conventional 180¡æ to 145¡æ, and the pressure value is simultaneously reduced by 22%, but the sealing strength is increased to 1.5 times the industry standard. "It's like installing a material gene library for the machine," the technical director demonstrated the dynamic parameter interface on the control screen, "The equipment can store 200 types of material property data, and no manual debugging is required when switching packaging materials." After a soy product company applied this technology, the packaging efficiency of corn starch lunch boxes jumped from 78% to 99.2%. At the discharge port of the equipment, a set of infrared spectrometers are scanning each finished product at the millisecond level. This packaging integrity detection system can not only identify tiny leaks, but also feed back defect data to the central control platform to optimize heat sealing parameters in real time. What surprised Chen Feng even more was that the environmental compliance report generated by the equipment can be directly connected to the government supervision platform: "In the past, a team of three people was required to manually organize the test data, but now the system automatically generates certification documents that meet the ISO 18606 standard."
When Chen Feng's factory completed the equipment upgrade, changes quietly occurred in every link of the supply chain. Packaging suppliers began to provide thinner degradable film materials-because intelligent adjustment technology can accurately control the packaging effect of 0.02mm thickness difference; the logistics department adjusted the warehousing plan-the 99.9% packaging qualification rate reduced the use of shockproof materials by 30%; even the company's ESG report was favored by investment institutions because of a 14% reduction in carbon footprint.
The workshop in the twilight was rejuvenated. Chen Feng looked at the smoothly running food packaging machine and suddenly found a green leaf-shaped icon jumping in the corner of the control screen. That was the carbon emission reduction data automatically calculated by the equipment, which was now continuously accumulated in grams. "It turns out that machines understand environmental protection better than we do," he said to the technicians with a smile, "What we should worry about is not the pressure of transformation, but the inability to keep up with the speed of technological change."
