How we work
Sustainability
Manufacturing & Sustainability as we see it:
Plastic materials have come under a lot of scrutiny in recent years due to mismanagement of waste streams with plastics ending up in the environment. Fact of the matter is that plastic when used correctly and for the right application can be a very sustainable solution. Production Heroes promotes the sustainable use of materials by integrating the following aspects in our work flow:
Avoiding mixing of compounds / fillers which are difficult to recycle, advise about better solutions.
Informing our clients about international recycling standards and icons to be added to components.
Informing our clients about possibility of more economic use of materials when judging received files.
Building an ever increasing database of recycled, biodegradable and biobased materials and pro-actively offer these options to our clients.
Enabling same priced tooling and components either made in Europe or China to enable our clients to choose in which continent to manufacture and lower their CO2 footprint on logistics.
Offering a CO2 neutral manufacturing option coupled to your manufacturing by the internationally accredited Trees For All foundation
Materials
Concerning recycled, biobased and bio-degradable materials there is a lot of confusion and nonsense being told; Production Heroes has a huge database of sustainable materials and informs clients about which are best fit for your purpose. The main differences between the categories of (bio)plastics are:
- Virgin: plastic resin produced from a petrochemical feedstock, such as natural gas or crude oil, which has never been used or processed before. These types of materials are widely available all over the world in many different variations.
- Recycled: post-consumer is a material that has been reclaimed after it has left the hands of the consumer. Depending on location in the world availability and quality can be limited, quality is never on the same level as virgin materials. Often when used it is mixed with virgin materials to get a compound which has enough quality to be processed.
- Cold biodegradable (compostable): plastics of which the composting process is automatically started when left in nature; either by water, UV or bacteria in the ground. These materials are still very rare and experimental; however many developments are taking place.
- Warm biodegradable (compostable): plastics which can be degraded by microorganisms into water, carbon dioxide (or methane) and biomass under specified conditions. These conditions are in heated industry based composting installations operated by either governments or large waste collecting companies. It is a fact that these installation can degrade hot biodegradable materials over time but the operation cycles to create compost are too short for these materials to decompose. So currently (2020) this means that these materials are not composted or recycled but most often burnt, and when left in nature they do no compost.
- Biobased: these are plastic compounds of which the origins before chemical processing were plant based, often used raw materials are: sugarcane, corn and starch. The resulting plastics (for example PLA, bio-PET and bio-PE) have the same properties as the varieties made from crude oil. The resulting plastic compounds are not biodegradable but can be recycled.
Additionally in judging how sustainable or durable a plastic is it also needs to be taken into account if the raw material could have been used for food purposes (human & animal) or if it was a waste material to begin with and how much energy is required in its manufacturing.
