5 Trends in Custom Plastic Injection Molding

A manufacturing process will remain popular, usable, and suitable only if it continues to evolve and improve constantly. Luckily, plastic injection molding companies near your location always keep in step with demands for parts and components across numerous industries by continually changing. This way, you can count on molding to keep producing the elements your company requires. But what exactly are the current trends in plastic injection molding?

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What are important current trends in plastic injection molding?

Plastic injection molding keeps increasing in popularity and scope. On the other hand, this manufacturing method continues to improve to meet the modern demands of different industries it caters to. Here are the five most modern trends in injection molding today: 

Sustainability

The plastic manufacturing industry, both traditional and injection molding, is undergoing a global shift toward greater sustainability and environmental friendliness. Numerous manufacturers are reexamining their operations and finding ways to create injection molded products using completely recycled materials for different industries. 

What’s more, these companies are also looking into ways to implement various hybrid or renewable energy sources in their manufacturing facilities. Finally, companies that produce plastic parts and components are also enhancing their waste disposal solutions, ensuring they reduce the potential harm for the environment. 

Bioplastic

The renewed interest manufacturers have for different types of bioplastic is directly related to the rising efforts for higher sustainability. PLA bioplastics represent an eco-friendlier alternative to petroleum-based materials. They are derived from various sustainable sources, including shrimp shells, seaweed, sugarcane, corn, and others. 

What’s more, this material is completely carbon-neutral and biodegradable, breaking down into water, carbon dioxide, and biomass in nature. This way, manufacturing facilities are creating a more eco-friendly alternative to traditional plastics with similar or identical properties required in many industries. 

Alternative materials

One of the leading trends in plastic injection molding is certainly the use of materials that are very resistant to extreme temperatures and completely free from corrosion. This way, they’re able to further boost the durability and longevity of various components. 

What’s more, the use of new materials also lowers their weight, improving their usability in different applications. This is vital for improving the general performance of certain products, such as boosting your car’s gas mileage or giving it longer battery life without sacrificing performance. 

Greater automation

A big part of plastic injection molding is already automated. However, this industry is looking to further boost automation through use of advanced software, analytics, and machine learning. This way, manufacturers achieve quicker production cycles, efficient maintenance, and reduced downtime. 

Also, increased automation provides more control over the different stages of the molding process through use of different software tools for fine-tuning the entire production cycle. Finally, greater automation also lowers manufacturing costs, creating a more profitable business model. 

Reshoring

Finally, the pandemic has shown the greater need for returning manufacturing facilities back into the USA from their locations overseas. The global logistics of shipping have increased the price of such transactions, making it sensible to reshore manufacturing efforts and focus on enhancing production efficiency. 

Who is the leader among plastic injection molding companies near me?

Plastic injection molding is a manufacturing process that’s constantly changing, evolving, and improving, which is why it continues to offer many benefits over other methods used for making plastic parts. There’s also other interesting information about plastic injection molding. For example, it’s extremely fast and efficient, which is why it’s used in a wide range of industries and applications. 

1. Efficient high production

Once you have developed the molds, the process is extremely fast with cycle times as short as 10 seconds. It is excellent for medium and high-volume production runs for anything from 10,000 parts to well over 100,000 depending on what molds you use. 

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Sometimes you can increase production by using a multi cavity or family mold, where several parts are produced from one press to further increase the manufacturing rate.

If you are outsourcing your molding then it’s also important to consider an efficient front-end design and order process – take a look at our on demand manufacturing.

4. Large material choice

There is a huge range of plastic materials that you can select from depending on what properties you need from your final part. And you are not limited to plastic, Protolabs also offers liquid silicone rubber molding. 

You can even use fillers in the molding material, which adds greater strength to the completed part, and you have a huge range of colors to choose from as well.  Talk to us about what you need your part to achieve – there are generally a number of different options.

1. Initial cost

If you are committing to steel mold tools for high production volumes (100,000+) then it can take a great deal of time and machining to produce and this can be a significant capital cost. If you need lower volumes of parts then this will affect your cost per part price and it may be worth exploring other options such as using aluminum molds instead.

2. Initial lead times

It can take up to 12 weeks to produce steel tooling. If you need to get production running before this then take a look at our on-demand production; by using aluminum molds and digitizing our front-end process we can ship anything from 25 to 10,000+ parts in 15 working days or less from the point that you first upload your CAD. Sometimes parts shipped in as little as one day.

For very low production runs there are other technologies such as 3D printing or CNC machining which could provide a more cost-effective answer more quickly.

3. Design limitations

You will need to consider certain design elements, such as:

• Using draft and radii to help ejection of the parts
• Avoiding undercuts and sharp edges
• Controlling wall thicknesses

You also need to consider where to place your gates, ejectors and cooling lines if aesthetics are important. And remember it’s also hard to change the design of a mold – you can remove part of the mold, or add plastic to your final part, but not the other way round.

For smaller production runs, 3D printing allows you to design virtually any shape or geometry that you require. As a rapidly developing technology there is an increasing number of plastic and other materials, even metal, that we can produce. 

4. Small part runs are not always cost effective

Most people think that they should only turn to injection molding for orders of 100,000+ parts; but there are other options when you can use this process for smaller production runs.

Using more affordable aluminium molds and quick turnaround times (as fast as a day) our on-demand service helps keep your per part cost down. It is ideal for anything between 10,000 and 25,000 parts, but can help control costs for production runs even smaller than this.

For low production runs measured in the hundreds or less then it is also worth exploring other manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing and CNC machining. With these technologies the cost per part will be lower and you will not face the initial set up costs or lead times involved in producing molds.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website Custom Mold Manufacturing.