Essentra Components announced it has created a new Centre for Excellence to test and develop bioplastics and plastics with recycled content at its UK headquarters in Kidlington, a village in Oxfordshire, England.
Testing will be conducted on both recycled content and various biodegradable and bio-based materials including bio-woods, nylon, and polylactic acids (PLA) to see how they perform when replacing or added to existing resins used in the manufacture of plastic components.
The centre invested in two types of injection moulding machines for the trialing of circular plastics: an all-electric machine and a servo drive machine. A servo drive machine is used to deliver power to a motor with feedback designed to accurately control position, speed, and torque in robotic and machine automation systems. Essentra said the machines will allow it to save energy while studying the impact that different tools have on the manufacturing process. The goal is to reduce scrap rates, accelerate delivery, and achieve an overall more efficient and sustainable process, the company said in a statement.
“We get many requests from customers around the sustainability aspects of our products,” said Jennifer Spence, head of sustainability strategy at Essentra. “The Centre of Excellence will support us in providing that data, including embedded emissions, recyclability, and how a material performs at the end of its life – for example whether the product can be re-used, and whether the materials are widely recyclable or biodegradable,” she explained.
The new centre includes Melt Flow Index (MFI) technology, which measures the ease of flow of the melt of a thermoplastic polymer. This will help predict the behaviour of a polymer in the manufacturing process. Gathering that data and building a database with it will be critical in Essentra’s future choices of materials.
The facility will be managed by Chris Butler, engineering director, and has a dedicated test engineer: “We've already made great strides,” Butler said, “and currently 20% of our global raw materials comprise recycled content. We have a responsibility to make sure that we do everything we can to make plastic components more sustainable for the future.”
Essentra has committed to sourcing 20% of packaging and polymer raw materials sustainably by 2025. It has also become a signatory of the European Commission’s statistical Classification of Products by Activity (CPA), thus becoming part of a Europe-wide movement to boost the use of recycled plastics in the market to 10 million tonnes by 2025.