EREMA Brand Guidelines: The 1983 Austrian Garage Firm Behind Plastics Recycling Machines

Three colleagues and one prototype.

EREMA has an exact birthday. On 14 April 1983, the company’s 2023 anniversary release says, Helmut Bacher, Helmuth Schulz and Georg Wendelin founded EREMA Engineering Recycling Maschinen und Anlagen GesmbH. The brand name is drawn from that long company name: Engineering Recycling Maschinen und Anlagen, German for machines and plants.

Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing reported in October 2024 that Bacher, a colleague of the other two, trained as a fitter and qualified as a mechanical engineer, then moved to a mechanical engineering company for plastics processing in the early 1970s, and that he, Wendelin and Schulz shared a commitment to developing cost-effective recycling solutions. At first, it said, the company filled orders from two small workshops and a double garage. The company’s own phrase for that period is a “Garagenfirma,” a garage firm. Its website records that a first EREMA prototype was built in the founding year, and its customer newsletter dates its first showing at the K trade fair in Germany to the same year. In the company’s words, this was “a time when plastics recycling was hardly an issue.”

The firm moved in 1986 to new premises at Ansfelden, near Linz in Upper Austria, which remain its headquarters. In 1991 it set up EREMA North America Inc. in Ipswich, Massachusetts. In 1992 3S, of Roitham in Upper Austria, joined as a subsidiary making extruder screws and core components. In 2001 EREMA China was founded in Shanghai.

The founders’ work was recognised locally: Bacher, Wendelin and Schulz together received the Golden Award of Honour from the Province of Upper Austria in 2008, Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing reported.

A family of machines ending in -REMA.

The company’s timeline says the whole extruder range changed in 1993 from a radial to a tangential system, which it calls more efficient, and that the 1,000th EREMA plant left the factory in 1997. Many of its product names are built on its own: VACUREMA, shown as an inline sheet system at an in-house event in 2001; COREMA, launched in 2012; INTAREMA, launched in 2013. More recent press material adds AGGLOREMA, a machine for producing agglomerates from heavily contaminated post-consumer plastic to prepare feedstock for chemical recycling. Each takes the company’s name as a suffix.

Other lines use different names. The company dates the ReFresher anti-odour technology to the K fair in 2016, the POWERFIL business unit, which sells melt filters as individual components for existing extrusion plants, to 2017, and VACUNITE to the Petnology fair in 2018. BluPort, a set of digital assistance systems, followed at K 2019. The ReadyMac, launched at K 2022, is a standardised machine made to stock, credited in a 2023 release to the group’s UMAC subsidiary and relaunched at the end of 2024.

The company’s website says about 7,500 of its systems are in use worldwide and counts 115 patent families with more than 1,000 patents. Its Customer Centre at Ansfelden, opened in 2012, lets buyers run trials with their own material.

Management passed from the founders in stages. The company’s timeline says they handed over to a new team of Gerhard Wendelin, Klaus Feichtinger and Manfred Hackl in 2006; Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing says Bacher retired from management in 2004, so the two dates differ. Gerhard Wendelin stepped down from the board in 2010. Hackl is chief executive of EREMA Group GmbH, and in 2023 he was named Plastics Recycling Ambassador of the Year at the Plastics Recycling Show Europe, Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing reported.

Machines and the line around them.

Machinery for plastics film, sheet and recycling is sold to plant owners and engineers, and its makers build their image on the machines themselves. The tallest of them is the blown-film tower, where a shining bubble of film rises several storeys before it is flattened and wound. Wide cast lines and winders offer the same kind of picture lying down: long, level and glossy, with the finished roll as the closing shot.

Close-ups supply the colour. Extruder barrels, guards and control cabinets are often finished in brand colours, which makes the livery of the line one of the few visual assets a maker fully owns. Thermoforming makers favour the end of the line, with formed trays stacking up as they leave the machine. Makers of bottles and preforms show rows of finished shapes.

Recycling has added its own set of pictures. Pellets in glass jars, shown before and after processing, turn an industrial step into something that can sit on a table at a trade stand. Bales of used film do the opposite job, showing the raw material as it arrives. Both images need careful handling, because they suggest a result that the words around them should state plainly and with a source.

The category’s main stages are its trade fairs, among them K in Düsseldorf, NPE in the United States, Plastpol in Poland and Fakuma in Germany. Stands there often feature running machinery. For a designer, this is a field where the identity has to work on a steel guard, a touch screen and a technical data sheet as well as on a web page. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker and leaves the rest out.

“Another Life for Plastic.”

EREMA is now one name in a group. In its 2023 press material, EREMA Group GmbH lists EREMA, 3S, PURE LOOP, UMAC, PLASMAC, KEYCYCLE and PLASTICPRENEUR, with roles that run from planning and engineering to system components and the trade in used machines. Coverage in 2021 described PURE LOOP as a shredder-extruder specialist, UMAC as the business for previously owned machines and KEYCYCLE as the planning and turnkey-project arm. Each carries its own name, while the parent’s line, “Another Life for Plastic. Because we care,” sits over them all in that boilerplate.

Its results release for 2022/23 said 270 extruders were built at its Austrian production sites, with PLASMAC, its Italian subsidiary, taking the group figure to 350. PolyForm NEXT reported that in January 2021 the group took over the Gruber & Kaja site at St. Marien, near the Ansfelden headquarters, where UMAC moved its production and administration from Styria, and where a hall was fitted out for large Vacurema systems and the paint shop was relocated.

Its ownership is private, and the company has called Georg Wendelin a former managing partner and long-time chairman of the supervisory board of EREMA Group GmbH. Partnerships have widened its reach beyond the extruder. In August 2023 Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing reported that the owners of EREMA Group and Lindner Holding had formed BlueOne Solutions, owned 50:50, to run joint research and offer recycling packages that coordinate extruder, washing system and material handling. In October 2025, at K in Düsseldorf, the group announced a strategic investment in BlockTexx, the Australian company that separates polyester and cellulose from blended textiles. And on 6 February 2026, at Plast India, EREMA and Lindner Washtech announced EREMA India, a joint sales and service subsidiary.

In June 2025 it launched “Edvanced Recycling,” a year-long campaign presented by Hackl and the head of marketing, Gerold Breuer, as a preview to K 2025, where it presented a new twin-screw system called TwinPro.

For a design guide, EREMA shows how a short company name can become a naming system for a whole catalogue. Compare Starlinger, another Austrian machinery name with a recycling line, and Gneuss, a German maker of melt filters and extrusion systems. For this guide we use a regranulate teal, a deep pine and a pellet sage with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep EREMA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.