Green Molding

Injection molders are responding to customers’ and brand owners’ goals of greater sustainability and “circularity” with a variety of technologies:

• Multilayer and sandwich molding to incorporate greater levels of scrap and recycled materials encapsulated by virgin plastics;

• Employing sophisticated controls that can adjust in real time for the viscosity variations introduced by recycled materials;

• Learning techniques for molding biobased materials—both bioresins and natural-fiber fillers and reinforcements;

• Lightweighting techniques to reduce the amount of plastics used in products without compromising their functionality;

• Increased use of post-consumer and post-industrial recycled content in injection molding operations.