Industry 4.0

2025 is a key milestone in the EU’s fight against plastic pollution, paving the way for more significant progress by 2030.

Phase 2 of the “PET Thermoform Recycling Costs & Material Flow Project” examined the technical, economic, and logistical challenges of recycling PET thermoforms and proposed actionable solutions to address these barriers.

Automation, sustainability, and 3D printing shape the blow molding’s future.

IBM’s innovative polymer optical waveguide (PWG) technology replaces traditional electrical interconnects with optical connections, offering faster, energy-efficient performance.

Plastics Engineering has conducted interviews throughout 2024 to obtain experts’ points of view on different topics related to the plastics industry.

Thermotropic Liquid Crystal Polymers (LCPs) have emerged as a high-performance engineering polymer, comparable to PEEK and PEI, for 3D printing in space environments.

Industry 6.0 represents the next evolution in manufacturing, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous decision-making robots, known as infobots. The progression of injection molding technology and its integration with advanced robotics offer greater efficiency and sustainability.

For tooling digitalization, we already spoke about the basics and application milestones here the final chapter closing loop checking the role of knowledge management across the supply chain.

The tooling digitalization during the whole supply chain is vital for maximizing productivity, improving operational efficiency, and minimizing downtime. But how and with what tools?

Tooling digitalization can be the solution for today’s manufacturing systems, where the tool failures can cause as much as 20% downtime, leading to significant productivity and profit losses.