DESIGN | INNOVATION
There are challenges ahead for technical injection moulders as electronic products and components start to be designed to be fit for the circular economy. David Eldridge reports on new projects and developments
Designing sustainability into electronic products
The sustainability agenda requires that plastics products not only become easier to recycle, but also incorporate more plastics recyclate. The recycling drive is not just about packaging, as many injection moulders of technical parts are being increasingly asked by customers to address the recyclability and recycled content of moulded products. But what happens when the products in question are the demanding moulding applications of the electronics industry? Putting the customer’s recycling request into practice raises issues in design, materials, processing and the supply chain for injection moulders. Some of these issues were discussed at AMI’s Plastic: Design for Sustainability conference in Berlin in December 2019. In the PolyCE project, design for recycling guidelines are being developed for electronic products, but the use of recyclate in new electron- ics products is also a focus of the project. Both development areas were discussed by project participants at the AMI conference. Gergana Dimitrova, Researcher and Project Manager at Fraunhofer IZM in Germany, said recyclers and product designers have not communicated their respective needs to each other in the past. The PolyCe project is developing two approaches to bridge this gap: “Gate A” concerns what a designer needs from materials recyclers in order to make
www.injectionworld.com
new products using recyclate; “Gate B” is about designing products to be recyclable. For the second approach, Fraunhofer IZM and Austrian recycler MGG Polymers are developing design for recycling guidelines. These are expected to be finished by the end of 2021, but Dimitrova shared some of the key guidelines in her presentation. The first guideline from the PolyCE project for designing new electronic products for recyclability is: keep the moulded product parts as big as possible, as small parts end up in the fines fraction at a recycling facility and so are not recycled. If possible, avoid moulding plastics around metal parts and avoid two-component moulding, as both types end up in a recycler’s heavy fraction and often are incinerated. It is advisable to use limited polymer types that are readily recycled; so in electronic products that means sticking with PC, PC/ABS, ABS, HIPS, PA and PP. Avoid PVC, due to the potential for hydrochloric acid to form as a degradation product; and if POM is being used, use only unblended POM, to avoid formaldehyde as a degradation product. Dimitrova’s co-presenter on the PolyCE project
was Thijs Feenstra, Product Developer and Project Lead at Pezy Group, a design and innovation company with 100+ staff at different locations in Netherlands. He said that about 10 years ago, Pezy
January/February 2020 | INJECTION WORLD 15
Main image: There are demanding electronics applications for injection moulding
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54
