Robot-based empties handling at the Paderborner brewery

Individual packaging is in vogue – in the brewing industry, too. For automated empties handling, however, this diversity means demanding requirements that are often newly introduced.

Even though the returnable beverage packaging quota has been decreasing for years, refillable bottles and crates are still in demand – especially in the brewing industry. And not just that: for many breweries, it is even worth sorting the empties of other brands according to type in order to later exchange them with their colleagues for their own empties.

This also applies to a large extent to the Paderborner brewery. It has been part of the Warsteiner Group since 1990. However, the tradition of the modern brewery dates back to 1852. Today, around 98 per cent of the beverages produced there is filled into reusable containers. The entire handling of empties also takes place in the immediate vicinity of the filling plants. “Whereas in the past the proportion of other-brand empties was about five per cent, today it accounts for more than a third,” says Uwe Bernardy, who is in charge of the bottling department at the Paderborner brewery. And he also states the reason for this development: the increasing individualisation of bottles and crates.

Currently, seven types of third-party empties are regularly prepared for transport on pallets. If this were sorted by hand today, 15 to 20 employees would have to do the job – a physically strenuous task which, in addition, no longer matches the generally high degree of automation of the filling line. After all, the Paderborner brewery was one of the first breweries in the world to use robots for the automatic sorting of bottles, having started in 2003.

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