The OnePlastics Group has invested €20 million in the last three years across its four UK manufacturing sites, as well as two facilities in Cork and Shanghai. In the last four years it has grown by 50 percent, with turnover reaching around €145 million in 2015.
“OnePlastics Group is striving to be a world-class leader in all of the businesses within our portfolio and to create revolutionary products in the sectors we operate in,” commented Karl Stillman, Group Sales Director for OnePlastics Group. “Our aim is to provide our clients with the most innovative plastic products possible along with the manufacturing capabilities to service demand. We are driving efficiencies through our businesses by investing in the latest equipment and technologies.”
Part of the investment programme, which has seen expansion at the Shanghai site and a cleanroom installed at Protech Performance Plastics in Cork, has been in new injection moulding equipment at its UK companies, Straight Ltd, MGB Plastics, AAC Plastics and Protech Performance Containers.
OnePlastics Group has now installed 44 Negri Bossi injection moulding machines across these locations, ranging from 55 to 2700 tonnes, many of these fitted with robots supplied by Negri’s Sytrama automation division. The most recent installation was at the AAC Structural Foam site in Tamworth, where four 1000-tonne plus Vector series machines and a 1000-tonne Bi-Power series ‘two-platen’ model are now in operation. Two of the Vector machines have a two-shot facility, where a horizontal secondary injection unit is being used to mould an integrated TPE seal into large diameter drainage products.
OnePlastics Group says these large machines have helped it meet its targets for reduction in energy consumption, full digital control and electric screw drives producing specific energy consumption figures in the region of 0.42 kWh per kilo of material processed.
“Our recent investments in large Negri Bossi IMM’s has helped us to maximise production efficiencies whilst simultaneously reducing energy consumption,” continued Stillman. “A prime example of the success of this philosophy would be the development of drainage risers that are moulded in a single operation. Rather than moulding bodies and seals individually and then combining them in a secondary operation, advanced tooling and the machines specified by Negri Bossi complete the process in a single cycle, this also greatly reducing post production scrap levels,” he concluded.
