Welcome to your new-look British Plastics & Rubber magazine.
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Regular readers will notice a vastly different style, not least in the front cover design. Going forward, each edition will focus on an interview with a leading light in the plastics industry. We’re kicking this off with my interview with Hardeep Khera, general manager at Bole UK. A relative newcomer to the UK IMM supplier network, Bole have certainly shaken things up.
Made in China, these machines have proven to be an attractive option for moulders and manufacturers, both for commodity and more technical work. Long-standing European partners seem to be moving towards offering the ‘no frills’ standard machine options that were historically offered to the Asian markets. With some brand owners reshoring their output inrecent years, it makes sense that the machines best-suited to the job would come to the West as well.
Also new is our ‘Meet the Moulder’ feature, which this issue focuses on WSM Plastics. I caught up with Neil Paice at WSM to learn more about the challenges facing WSM –and indeed many moulders – in the current climate. Not surprisingly, one of the critical pain points is the continual onslaught of rising overheads, from energy costs to resin price hikes.
While both factors are showing signs of a shift to a *slightly* more palatable scenario at the start of the year, conditions remain far from ideal for healthy profit margins. That said, WSM remain optimistic, and have taken some sustainable learnings from the challenges of recent years. Turn to page 16 to find out more.
On the subject of sustainability and energy, I just finished recording the latest episode of the Interplas Insights podcast, which was a special focus on sustainable plastics processing in the face of high energy costs. I was joined by Jo Davis, managing director at Broanmain Plastics, Robin Kent, managing director at Tangram Technologies, and probably the world’s leading voice on this topic, and finally Carl Reeve, managing director at Premier Moulding Machinery/Haitian.
It was a wide-ranging discussion, which explored the priorities for moulders’ capex, as well as smaller, less costly changes that can make a big difference. Jo herself has been on one of Robin’s courses, and through the changes they’ve made at Broanmain, the company has even been able to afford staff an early finish on a Friday, so significant were the savings.
More important than financial investment though is an investment in culture change. Most of us are at work more than we’re at home. At home, we’ve learned to be recyclers, we’ve learned to turn off the lights when we’re not using them. So why don’t we do that at work? Because it’s not our money? To get leave the planet in a sustainable state for the next generation, we need to be thinking differently at work.
Find out more in the next episode of the podcast, searchSpotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts (or whichever provider you use) for ‘Interplas Insights’ and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss an episode.
