EREMA and AIPMA Open Recycling Training Centre in Mumbai to Address India's Skills Gap
India’s plastic recycling industry stands at a crossroads. The country generates millions of tonnes of plastic waste annually, yet the sector that could transform it into valuable secondary raw material faces a persistent bottleneck: a shortage of trained operators who understand the sophisticated machinery modern recycling demands. On March 17, 2026, that bottleneck began to loosen when EREMA and the All India Plastics Manufacturers Association formally opened the Recycling Skill Centre at AMTEC in Mumbai — India’s first dedicated hands-on training facility for plastic recycling professionals.
The centre emerges from a memorandum of understanding signed on February 5, 2026, between EREMA and AIPMA’s Arvind Mehta Technology and Entrepreneurship Centre. Its mission is narrowly defined but strategically vital: to produce operators and foremen who can run, maintain, and optimize industrial-scale recycling extrusion lines. The curriculum, developed jointly by AMTEC and EREMA’s technical specialists, centers on a seventy-two-hour course that blends classroom theory with practical machine time on an INTAREMA 605 TE system — a fifty to one hundred kilogram per hour recycling line that EREMA has provided free of charge for training purposes.
The choice of equipment is deliberate. The INTAREMA 605 TE represents the class of machine increasingly deployed across India’s growing recycling infrastructure: a single-screw extrusion system with integrated filtration and degassing, capable of processing post-consumer films, flakes, and regrind into pellet quality suitable for demanding applications. Trainees who complete the course will have operated this exact technology under realistic conditions — melt pressure management, filter change procedures, degassing optimization, and quality control sampling — rather than learning on the job at a production facility where mistakes carry commercial consequences.
For EREMA, the investment extends beyond corporate social responsibility. The Austrian company, which traces its roots to the invention of the first industrial plastic recycling extruder in 1983, has watched India’s recycling capacity expand rapidly in recent years. But equipment sales alone do not guarantee successful projects. “High-end technology unfolds its full potential only when operated by well-trained specialists,” noted Markus Huber-Lindinger, Managing Director at EREMA, during the signing ceremony in Mumbai. The training centre creates a pipeline of qualified personnel who can commission, operate, and troubleshoot EREMA installations — reducing start-up risks for customers and strengthening the company’s service ecosystem in a market that is becoming central to its global growth strategy.
AIPMA, representing thousands of Indian plastics processors, sees the centre as addressing a structural gap in the industry’s human capital. Arvind Mehta, Chairman of AIPMA, highlighted the disconnect between theoretical education and practical recycling expertise: “With this new training centre we are closing the previous gap between theory and practice-oriented training. The cooperation with EREMA enables us to impart knowledge directly on industrial equipment and thus produce a new quality of specialists for India’s recycling industry.” AMTEC will serve as the industry interface, connecting graduates with employment opportunities at member companies and recyclers across the subcontinent.
The timing aligns with India’s evolving regulatory landscape. The Plastic Waste Management Rules, strengthened in 2022 and 2024, mandate escalating recycled content targets for packaging and impose extended producer responsibility obligations on brand owners. Meeting these targets requires not just collection infrastructure but processing capacity that consistently delivers food-grade and technical-grade recyclate — a quality threshold that skilled operators are essential to achieve. The centre’s first batch of trainees is scheduled to begin in late May 2026, with a target of certifying several hundred operators annually once fully ramped.
Beyond the immediate training mandate, the centre is designed as a platform for ongoing knowledge exchange. EREMA’s process engineers will conduct regular technology update workshops, covering advances in filtration, degassing efficiency, and digital monitoring systems such as EREMA’s BluPort remote diagnostics platform. AIPMA plans to incorporate the centre into its broader skill development initiatives, potentially expanding into specialized modules for PET bottle-to-bottle recycling, polyolefin film-to-film loops, and chemical recycling pre-treatment — areas where India’s policy framework is creating new market opportunities.
The Recycling Skill Centre at AMTEC represents a pragmatic response to a challenge that technology alone cannot solve: the human element of the circular transition. As India’s plastic recycling industry scales from informal collection networks toward formalized, mechanized processing, the availability of trained operators will determine whether installed capacity translates into actual output — and whether the recycled polymers that reach the market meet the quality specifications that brand owners and regulators demand. In the quiet of a training hall in Mumbai, with an Austrian extrusion line humming under the hands of the first cohort of students, that future is taking shape one shift at a time.
Sources:
- EREMA, “EREMA und AIPMA eröffnen Recycling-Ausbildungszentrum in Mumbai,” March 17, 2026. https://www.erema.com/de/presse-news/erema-und-aipma-eroeffnen-recycling-ausbildungszentrum-in-mumbai--3270/
- EREMA, “EREMA and AIPMA Open New Recycling Training Centre in Mumbai,” March 17, 2026. https://www.erema.com/en/public-relations-news/erema-and-aipma-open-new-recycling-training-centre-in-mumbai/
- Plastics News, “Erema, AIPMA to open plastics recycling training centre in Mumbai,” March 2026. https://www.plasticsnews.com/processors/recycling/sp-erema-aipma-plastics-recycling-training-centre-mumbai/
- Recycling Magazine, “Erema supports plastics recycling training centre in Mumbai,” March 17, 2026. https://www.recycling-magazine.com/2026/03/17/plastic-recycling-training-mumbai/