13 Nov The eco-conception at the heart of your plastic piece
Designing your plastic piece in order to limit the waste is not only an environmental question. This is also the opportunity of a global reflection to optimize its production and at the end, its cost.
As a lot of sectors, the plastic injection doesn’t avoid the waste issue. The recycling, the energy transformation and the burying constitute the three answers that the industry currently brings to the wast management. Searching to optimize the first one in order to reduce as much as possible the third one.
A new approach, appearing well before the production cycle, considers the waste issue in a different way. On the premise that « the best waste is the one we don’t produce », this approach doesn’t target to optimize the plastic waste management but to limit the production from the design of the product. This is eco-conception.
The eco-conception, the common theme of the conception of your plastic piece
In plastic injection sector, the eco-conception involves to design a product without producing any waste :
- By the use of a mold with hot canals to avoid the production of waste corresponding to the canals of the mold (the cores).
- If this is not possible, through the reground of the cores (if there are cores) and then the reinjection in the production process.
- By optimizing the production processes to limit the scrap pieces.
- Using reused contents for the packaging : returnable plastic trays
Further to these aspects, an essential part of the eco-conception approach concerns the choice of recyclable materials. Not only for the waste processing and the scrap pieces of the production, but especially to make the recycling of the end-of-life pieces possible.
Goal zero waste for Tarkett’s project
Since the creation of its engineering department, Serviplast suggests to its customers to adopt the eco-conception approach in the management of their new projects.
- That was the case for the last project made for our customer Tarkett. We had to create a new plugdesign for mandrels. Regarding Tarkett, the goal was to streamline the existing range which was composed of 8 variants, to reduce it to 4.
- The first reflexion of the engineering department was the design of the piece in order to lighten it as much as possible. To limit its weight and therefore its amount of substance allows to reduce the cost but also the substance used.
- The choice of the substance fell on a recycled HDPE. The production waste are reground so they are directly reinjected in the supply of the press. That way we can reach zero waste since the scrap pieces are also reground.
Finally, the last aspect of the project consisted on the use of the reusable plastic containers for the shipping of the pieces. Once again, we don’t generate any waste.