Recorded Wednesday, March 10 at 11AM EST – Presented by RTP Company
Overcome common industry issues, such as weight reduction, parts consolidation, extended life, flammability requirements, static charge management, and expanded operating conditions through the use of thermoplastic compounds!
In this one-hour webinar presented by RTP Company’s International Technology Manager, Dr. Joel Bell, and Industrial Market Manager, Will Taber, you will learn how to solve material handling issues by using thermoplastic compounds that provide attributes such as:
- reduced wear and friction
- conductive
- elastomeric
- flame retardant
- structural, and
- visual properties
Watch now to discover how thermoplastic compounds can provide design flexibility and bring value to your material handling applications.
Webinar Transcript
Let’s talk about the material handling industry. By definition, material handling is the movement, protection, storage and control of materials and products throughout manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, consumption, and disposal. That’s a pretty broad definition. It is a very big industry. It’s expected to grow to $123 billion this year. It’s very important to us. We’ve invested a lot of time and resources here and have a lot of valuable products to help our customers grow their business and meeting their customer objectives.
We are involved in a lot of different products, conveyors at large, whether that’s belting, rollers, tracks, guides, we are involved in a lot of applications there, as well as casters and wheels, both the treads that you might over-mold and then the hubs themselves that might be of different molded plastics. We are involved in a number of types of bins, pallets and totes, anything from structural products to flame retardant or anti-static or static dissipative products. We are involved in a lot of dock equipment. Forklifts and pallet jacks are also typical applications.
There’s a lot other trends that we see that’s driving a lot of activity with our customers within the industry. Advanced equipment is certainly a big area. You see a lot of work in automated conveying systems, in automated guided vehicles, different types of electric vehicles and the associated components, storage, and tracking systems.
And really the drivers for this that we see come up over and over is people looking for reduced labor costs, energy efficiency, growing e-commerce, growing international trade, and then developing nations. As countries develop their manufacturing base, they need ways to deal with that more successfully, more efficiently, and more cost effectively as well. Those are some of the trends that we see.
Now we’d like to talk about our particular product families. They include structural, wear resistant products, conductors, thermoplastic elastomers, flame retardant, color, and then film and sheet. And of course we have a lot of cross pollination of these product groups. For instance, you may have a structural product, say a material that is nylon 6/6 that’s glass reinforced and also conductive, or you may have a tool housing that’s a glass reinforced nylon and also pre-color. We’ll talk in depth a lot of these different technologies, product groups, and how we use them together to aid our customers.
Download full transcript here…
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I’ve always been curious about how people handle materials. I think it’s cool that there’s an industry around the whole concept! It makes sense they would want to do it good, since they don’t want to accidentally damage any products. Thanks for sharing!