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Sustainability or design for the environment was almost always considered at the end of the design process. This can no longer be the case; sustainability is no longer about the environment. It is the environment. 

Simple process energy measurement and analysis quickly and easily shows that machine selection and operation can dramatically affect energy use and profitability of injection molding. 

A policy and Sustainability Management Program are not really useful unless the employees know about them and can take action to meet the targets. The employees can only do this if they know the targets and the progress towards the targets. 

Injection molding machines have ‘base’ and ‘process’ loads and an idling machine is not ‘free’, it is costing large amounts of energy and money.  

Sustainability management is a continuing process that must become an integral part of the business operations. Sustainability management is not a single act but a process. 

Most plastics processing sites use gas simply for space heating but some processes use gas as part of the process, e.g., rotational molding.  Where gas is used for hot water only then this is generally relatively constant over the year. For space heating, the gas use load will be related to the weather conditions (how cold it is) and the weather is then a ‘condition’ driver for gas use. 

Sustainability will not be ‘completed’ in one or two years. It is a long-term program that will define and change how a company operates in the future. The sustainability road map a prioritized set of actions designed to get a company from where it is today to where needs to be in the future. 

In most plastics processing electricity is the main energy source. Electricity use is not, as is sometimes thought, fixed and uncontrollable, it is variable and controllable. For most sites, the electricity use will be directly related to the production volume in a given time period. 

The materiality of an issue is another way of asking ‘how relevant and important is it?’. This is considered from two perspectives, those of the broader stakeholders (internal and external) and those of the company itself. 

Many sites simply get the energy bill from the supplier and pay this some days later by direct transfer from their bank. The bill is not examined for accuracy or for potential areas to reduce costs and sometimes the production people don’t even see a copy of the bill – even though they are responsible for using most of the energy.