Hueck Folien Takes Major Strides Toward Eco-Neutral Production

Austrian-based film and foil specialist Hueck Folien, a leading supplier of security threads and foils for banknotes, is taking a number of steps to put its products at the forefront of sustainability and reach its goal of ecologically-neutral production by 2035.

One such step is its high purity recycled aluminium, which is used to produce high-gloss metallised films and was first presented at Labelexpo 2023 in Brussels.

High-gloss metallisation require shigh-purity aluminium and, previously, recycled aluminium with this purity standard was not available. Hence Hueck Folien has set up a recycling circuit for industrial aluminium scrap – from collection to melting to wire drawing. It is the first company to have a supply-chain for the high quality recycled aluminium for vacuum evaporation onto films.

The entire production at Hueck Folien has now been converted to high quality recycled aluminium, which is vacuum evaporated onto films.

The main benefit of this initiative, aside from the recycling of raw materials, is the reduction in CO2 emissions. The CO2 footprint for 1kg of standard evaporation wire from Europe is 15kg CO2-equivalent (CO2e), whereas the recycled aluminium wire introduced by Hueck Folien has only 2.2kg CO2e – an 85% saving.