ecoMetals TV: Interview with Lars Fagerholm, Maillefer Group

Oh, Maillefer is a company with a 100-year history in especially polymer extrusion for wire and cable and pipe and tube technology. So this means that we provide not only machinery but also technology and know-how to customers and producers worldwide.

Sustainability is a broad concept. So, of course, today sustainability for us is very much about reliability and reliable development and providing means and components and technology to our customers that can provide them, for example, savings. Mainly for us, it means savings in energy in their production, but it also means, I think, the biggest potential there is the savings in materials, reducing scrap, and also the consistency and the quality of the product that actually then demands less material.

Oh, this is a trend that has started, I would say, already 10 years ago. Today, I think technology leaders like us and our customers, they rely and understand that they cannot do the innovation and all the development by themselves. So I would say thinking is really to be a house of experts. I mean a provider of any know-how that customer needs. We have a very strong platform of technology centers with pilot machinery and everything else, labs. So today, we are doing with both the material suppliers and also with all the customers, we are doing collaboration especially in the technology field, and this is becoming more and more a common standard in the industry, and I'm very happy to see that happening.

Yes, we do. So this is on the path of digitalization and how to utilize the data, especially on the process side. So we have kind of put the bar very high for us that it's not enough for us to just collect data and kind of look at the data and then tell the customers that you have a problem you need to solve. So what we do is that we connect the data to the process knowhow of the production and then we kind of close the loop to the process control. So our target is to make the lines more autonomous and kind of correct the faults by themselves. And I think this is also the trend that any customers we talked to today want to see: more autonomous lines, more reliable, more consistent, not operator dependent. And also for sustainability, this is one of the key drivers for saving material and energy.

Oh, I think we feel extremely fortunate because we are especially in the wire and cable side, we are part of what we could call the green electrification. And so we provide an important part in the chain of making this possible. And so our role, I think, is significant. Our employees feel and are very proud of being there. So that is one part of this. The other part is then also being able to provide components and technology that actually can get to the savings. So if you put a dimension on this, if you look at Maillefer, it has provided about 5,000 extrusion lines worldwide. And if you take those 5,000 extrusion lines, there's about 5 to 6 megatons of polymer going through these lines every year. Which means that if we can save 10%, which is very possible, that would mean an extremely high savings and it would contribute about one megaton of carbon dioxide reduction. So this is kind of the scale of our impact just on material.

Thank you, it was a pleasure to be here.