The OnePlastics Group employs in excess of 500 employees and utilises over 130 machines within its four UK injection moulding sites, and the two Protech Performance Plastics sites in Cork and Shanghai.
The Cork facility also hosts a dedicated Innovation Centre of Excellence which was established in 2015 to foster innovation and new product development across the OnePlastics Group. The Group also operates a design office in Boston, USA.
Over the last three years, the Group has invested €20 million across its sites, turnover in 2015 reaching around €145 million, growth having been an impressive 50% over a four year period. More recent investment has been in relation to a soon to open state-of-the-art food grade manufacturing facility at the site of Protech Performance Plastics in Cork, this having a large Euro 8 classification clean-room, new machinery, automation and tools.
The Shanghai facility will also double in size to 50,000 square feet. The site caters to engineered plastics for electronics and computer and complete supply chain management.
In 2014, the four UK based manufacturing facilities, Straight Ltd, MGB Plastics, AAC Plastics and Protech Performance Containers, together with Protech Performance Plastics in Cork and Shanghai were brought into the newly formed OnePlastics brand. The group has invested heavily in new injection moulding equipment, bringing Negri Bossi’s UK total across the four UK sites up to 44 machines, ranging from 55 to 2700 tonnes, many of these being fitted with robots supplied by their Sytrama automation division. All machines are supported by a comprehensive service and maintenance contract.
Most recently, the AAC structural Foam site in Tamworth has installed four 1000 tonne plus Vector series machines and a 1000 tonne Bi-Power series ‘two-platen’ model. Two of the Vector machines have a two-shot facility, a horizontal secondary injection unit being used to mould an integrated TPE seal into large diameter drainage products.
All of these large machines have helped the Group to meet their targets for reduction in energy consumption, full digital control and electric screw drives producing specific energy consumption figures in the region of just 0.42 kWh per kilo of material processed.
Karl Stillman, the Group Sales Director commented, “OnePlastics Group is striving to be a world-class leader in all of the businesses within our portfolio and to create revolutionary products in the sectors we operate in. Our aim is to provide our clients with the most innovative plastic products possible along with the manufacturing capabilities to service demand.”
“We are driving efficiencies through our businesses by investing in the latest equipment and technologies. Our recent investments in large Negri Bossi IMM’s has helped us to maximise production efficiencies whilst simultaneously reducing energy consumption. A prime example of the success of this philosophy would be the development of drainage risers that are moulded in a single operation. Rather than moulding bodies and seals individually and then combining them in a secondary operation, advanced tooling and the machines specified by Negri Bossi complete the process in a single cycle, this also greatly reducing post production scrap levels”.
