Plastone promotes the recycling and product design of industrial plastics

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Execution time 2023-2024

Plastone supplies the industrial sector with injection moulded plastic parts and products assembled from them. The factories are located in Nurmijärvi, Finland, and Tallinn, Estonia, and the assembly plant is located in Haapsalu, Estonia. They have a total of about 200 employees.

The plastic raw materials used by Plastone are mainly technical plastics for which no proper recycling system has been established yet. A particular challenge in this respect is that there are numerous different plastic grades with different manufacturing parameters, whose suitability for different applications varies.

The materials of used products cannot be sensibly recycled in any other way than chemically. This means going back to the elements of plastic, and the processing of special materials starts from the beginning. In this case, the properties that expensive materials already possess cannot be directly utilised.

With mechanical recycling, materials can be reused immediately. However, it requires knowing exactly what the material is and the parts must be clean, which means that collecting material from the field is not an option.

The materials generated as side streams during manufacturing are known and can also be kept clean. The only challenge is to obtain sufficient volumes to make recycling economically viable.

In the PlastLIFE project, Plastone aims to collect side streams from the use of raw materials from several manufacturers to obtain a sufficient amount of material for recycling. For this purpose, we will design a new product for which these collected materials can be used and launch it onto the market.

This is how Plastone’s part in the PlastLIFE project is progressing

Plastone is a subcontractor of plastic components and final products mainly to other industries, like electrical industry, machines and devices and healthcare products. In PlastLIFE Plastone develops the use of factory side streams for new products. There is already a recycling system for packaging plastics in Finland, but not for technical plastics Plastone mainly uses. The challenge of recycling technical plastics is the countless different variations. It is very difficult to mechanically recycle plastic parts returning from the use, because it is impossible to tell what plastic it is exactly. Even if the quality is marked, there are also countless variations that affect the processing of the plastic. Therefore, chemical recycling, i.e. returning plastic to its elements, is the only reasonable option. This is expensive and loses the fine properties of technical plastics, so it is not economically viable. Plastone’s goal is to collect production side streams from manufacturers in the surrounding area, of which we know exactly what raw material they are, and to collect sufficient volumes from them for mechanical recycling. In mechanical recycling, the plastic product is ground into small pieces and melted again, and new products are made directly from it. For this purpose, the project also develops a new product or products suitable for such recycled materials, which will be delivered to the market through partners or group companies.

As the first pilot product has been selected a veterinary speculum for otoscope, especially for dogs, designed in the project. This is a disposable or multi-use hygiene protection and a light guide, which allows the veterinarian to examine the animal’s ear canal. Usually, specula designed for humans are used for animals, but these are rarely well suited for that purpose, because animal ear canals are usually longer than human ear canals. There are some similar products on the market, but they are often of poor quality. It seems that there is plenty of room on the market for a good quality veterinary speculum made from recycled material.

In the project, an injection moulding mould for the speculum is made, and the first trials are supposed to be made at the beginning of September. The recycled materials for the first batches have been found and the investigation of additional materials continues.

Further information on the role of Plastone in the PlastLIFE project