Sustainability and environmental responsibility are hot topics in the world of manufacturing right now and Plastics are currently having a lot of mostly unjustified bad press. This being the case, it’s a great pleasure to be part of an initiative to supply educational establishments with the means to recycle scrap thermoplastics. Technology students use the equipment within their projects, raising awareness that it’s not plastics which are the pariah: the problem is what the human race does with plastic products which have reached the end of their useful life – or with any other scrap plastic.
The designing and manufacturing expertise of our customer CR Clarke enables them to specialise in providing a range of high quality plastics processing solutions for education and production businesses. Last year, Shini UK/Trace PT supplied around twenty Shini granulators to CR Clarke who make various modifications to them such as converting them from three phase to single phase, to make them suitable for use in classrooms and college workshops.
School technology departments use a lot of acrylic for design and production projects. One student at
Nottingham Trent University has been collecting scrap acrylic from schools for use in recycling projects. Off-cuts of acrylic are fed into a Shini SG Series low-speed granulator, to produce a fine regrind, which has been used in a variety of processes including the remanufacture of sheet acrylic produced in a heated sheet press designed and manufactured by CR Clarke.
A similar process is being undertaken by students at Exmouth College, and Shini granulators are in use at schools and colleges around the country, providing regrind materials for injection and blow moulding, thermoforming and other processes.
Maurice Clarke, Managing Director of CR Clarke, said: “We have a great relationship with the guys at Trace PT, who have arranged for stocks of our preferred model of Shini Granulator to be held locally to ensure we can meet the short delivery programmes often required by the DoE. The granulators are reliable, extremely well-engineered and fit perfectly within our product portfolio. Demand for them is increasing. This is indicative of the growing interest in sustainable manufacturing, particularly among the next generation of production engineers.”
CR Clarke also supplies Shini granulators for recycling plastic waste recovered from beaches: another story we’ll be covering in a later blog.
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