Glass to glide on rails
Packaging firm Verallia to use north Italian rail triangle.
The first tests were a success, so the French glass packaging corporation Verallia will soon run its logistics between Lombardy, Piedmont and Veneto on a road / rail solution that’s powered by Metrocargo Italia.
Verallia, a glass packaging specialist, is giving its logistics activities between Piedmont, Lombardy and Veneto a new intermodal twist. The project will link Verallia’s transport services between the Borgo San Dalmazzo railway terminal to its plants in Gazzo Veronese (near Verona), Villa Poma (near Mantova) and Lonigo (near Vicenza), and also connect to the supplier Sibelco Italia’s transport needs. Verallia, the global No. 3 in its segment, produced approximately 16 billion packaging units in 2020.
Melania Molini, the general manager of Metrocargo Italia, the logistics services provider for this project, believes that her firm’s solution will be competitive in terms of utilisation rates, costs and service levels. It will run the rail transport operations for the sand raw material between Borgo San Dalmazzo and Valdaro, and return the final products – approximately 68,000 pallets a year – to Piedmont. The railways will generate less CO2 emissions, a key factor in this scheme. The reduction will come to 2,366 t – as much as a woods of 80,000 trees absorbs in a year.
Taking trucks off the roads
Verallia Italia’s supply chain director Antonino Virgillito explained that “in 2021 we reduced our polluting emissions by 12% vis-à-vis the previous year. This figure will rise if we shift the transport of more sand – one of our key raw materials – to the railways. Until 2019 all sand was carried by lorries.” Virgillito projects that using the railways will help the company take 4,000 truck runs a year off the roads, which helps reduce bottlenecks and will reduce the firm’s total emissions by around 45%.