Material Tracking and Hopper Monitoring in Plastics Production
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.