Nypro Exec On The Future Of Plastics
PHOTO/MATT PILON
Michael McGee, director of technology at Nypro Inc., speaks at the MassPlastics 2011 Trade Show in Fitchburg. The two-day event continues through 4 p.m. today.
There are three game-changing trends happening in the plastics manufacturing industry, and companies would be wise to stay on top of all of them, according to Michael McGee, director of technology at Nypro Inc.
Those trends are nanotechnology, sustainability and bio-based coatings and materials, McGee told an audience at the MassPlastics 2011 Trade Show in Fitchburg. The event, which includes exhibits from more than 50 companies, started Tuesday and continues through 4 p.m.
McGee said that companies that do business with the Clinton-based precision plastic products manufacturer at its 44 locations in 15 countries around the world are usually an accurate indicator of trends on the horizon.
"They give us industry trends pretty far out," McGee said. "At corporate, we look at ‘What are these macro trends? What are those unavoidable technologies that are going to change our business forever?'"
Evolving Industry
The first trend noted by McGee, nanotechnology, promises to have wide-ranging effects on the plastics industry.
"This is a seismic, disruptive change in how we look at and approach product development," he said.
To be ahead of the curve in this area, Nypro has partnered with the University of Massachusetts in Lowell for the past six years to develop commercial applications for nanotechnology, which carries the possibility of extra-strong plastics and other developments.
The second trend, sustainability, is particularly important to the electronics and packaging industries, which are major customers of Nypro. Those suppliers have been loud and clear on sustainability, McGee said. They want to be able to "tell the story" of sustainability to their own customers.
McGee said that Nypro's packaging segment is the fastest growing at the company, bringing in about $250 million in revenues for the most recent fiscal year, so marketing Nypro's own practices has become a priority.
The company will issue a sustainability report in the near future that tracks its global carbon footprint. The Clinton company headquarters has had a policy for the past two decades that it would not send any waste to landfills and recently announced plans for a major solar energy installation at a North Carolina plant.
And finally comes bio-plastics.
Nypro has moved into biopolymers in the past few years, which some consider a more renewable option because they do not contain oil products. But McGee said there are challenges to bringing bio-plastics to consumers on a large scale. They include mass production problems and debates over the source of the biomass material used to make the product, which may be food stocks like starch, corn or cellulose.
"We don't make money by getting into those debates," McGee said. "As that debate continues to rage, we need to be creative enough to bring other solutions."
Other ongoing trends in the plastics industry include increasing demand for customization and accelerated product development cycles.
Those were trends that David Leboeuf, senior account manager with Leominster-based F&D Plastics, could agree with. F&D's booth advertised "lightning-quick turnaround times."
Leboeuf said that many jobs in his industry may have shipped overseas in the past 15 years, but he said custom design jobs have a stronger foothold here in the United States.
"A lot of our business is just in the nick of time," Leboeuf said. "You can't get custom over the pond."
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