2 posts tagged with "plastics"

In plastics manufacturing, your product is only as good as the material feeding it. A $500,000 injection molding press running $3/lb engineering resin can produce flawless parts — or expensive scrap — depending entirely on whether the right material, at the right moisture content, at the right blend ratio, arrives at the barrel at the right time.

Yet material management remains one of the least instrumented, most manually-dependent processes in the typical plastics factory. Operators check hopper levels by tapping on the side and listening. Dryer dewpoint gets verified once per shift — maybe. Regrind ratios are "about 20%" based on someone's best guess. And contamination? That gets caught when customers start rejecting parts.

The gap between how materials should be managed and how they actually are managed represents one of the largest hidden cost drivers in plastics processing — typically 3–8% of total material cost, which for a facility processing 5 million pounds of resin annually at $1.50/lb average, means $225,000–$600,000 per year in preventable waste.

Electricity doesn't just power a plastics factory — it defines its profitability. For most plastics processors, energy represents 20–30% of total manufacturing cost, second only to raw resin. Yet the vast majority of plants have no visibility into where those kilowatt-hours actually go. The utility bill arrives, someone winces, and everyone moves on.

That approach worked when energy was cheap. In 2026, with industrial electricity rates climbing past $0.12/kWh in many regions and sustainability reporting becoming a procurement requirement, ignorance isn't bliss — it's margin erosion.

Per-machine energy monitoring changes the equation entirely. When you can see exactly how many kWh each injection molding press, extruder, or auxiliary system consumes per pound of resin processed, you stop guessing and start optimizing.