With the upgrading of environmental protection requirements and the segmentation of consumer demand, the plastic preform industry presents three major development directions:
Environmental protection: lightweight and recyclable
Lightweight: reduce raw material consumption and reduce the transportation cost of finished bottles by optimizing mold design and reducing preform wall thickness (such as PET preform weight from 20g to 15g);
Recyclable: Promote single material (such as pure PET) preforms to avoid recycling difficulties caused by the compounding of different materials; Develop preforms of biodegradable plastics (e.g., PBAT/PLA) to replace traditional non-degradable materials.
Efficiency: automation and scale
Equipment upgrade: using high-speed injection molding machines (firing rate of more than 500mm/s), with multi-cavity molds (such as 128 cavities), a single equipment can produce more than 1 million preforms per day, improving production efficiency;
Intelligence: Introduce MES (production execution system) and visual inspection system to monitor the size and appearance of preforms in real time, automatically eliminate non-conforming products, and reduce manual intervention.
High-end: Functional and customized
Functionalization: Develop "high-barrier preforms" (such as adding EVOH barrier layer to PET) to improve the oxygen and light barrier performance of finished bottles and extend the shelf life of food (such as for red wine, coffee and other easily oxidized products);
Customization: According to customer needs, design preforms with special shapes (such as special-shaped preforms) and special colors (such as frosted and gradient) to meet the packaging needs of high-end cosmetics and health care products.