Berry Plastic Tour

Our Materials and Processes Class toured Berry Plastic located in Lawrence Kansas. Berry plastics has many locations and other plants, but Lawrence hosts one of its major injection and thermo forming plants. They are the largest consumer of polyethylene plastic in North America! Out tour guide informed us that Berry goes through roughly 65 million lbs of virgin plastic a year. Berry plastic produces a variety of packaging and container solutions. Their most common market is packing for retail. At the plant we visited, it was primarily food retail packaging. Their clients included the like of McDonalds, Taco Bell, and Starbucks. The products we viewed being made at the plant were cups, tubs, and lids of varying sizes. They were using mainly two different forming technologies at the plant: Thermoforming and Injection Molding. Injection molding is a process for producing parts by injecting heated plastic material into a mold. The molds have to made from steel and weigh more than several tons to be able to handle the intense 8 ton pressure of the injection process. The Machines at Berry were melting down small pellets of plastic in a hopper and then using a Hydraulic piston to force the molten plastic into the mold. The molds were water cooled to start hardening the part in the mold. In both Injection molding and thermoforming the plastic is only in the mold for a matter of seconds, before it is ejected out. Thermoforming is a manufacturing process that uses polyethylene and styrene plastic in rolled sheet form that is heated to a pliable forming temperature and then fed in ribbon form on a conveyer to then be formed to a specific shape in a mold. The thermoforming team at Berry used aluminum molds instead of steel ones (as opposed to the injection molding process) because the pressure was very low for the molding process; around 2 tons. After the plastic rolls into and vacuumed into a thermoforming mold, it continues to roll along still in sheet form right into a punch die where the molded shapes are then cut out. For a finishing process, the cups are either sorted, stacked and boxed, or they go through a printing process and are then sorted, stacked, and boxed. Some clients want printing on their cups for branding purposes. The minimum order of printed cups is 50,000 units per print order. The reason for this is that their industrial printer must be purged and cleaned before changing printing operations, which is an extremely expensive process. Berry Plastic boasted the fact that the thermoforming process recycled their scrap and waste plastic by feeding into a grinder and producing more plastic sheeting. At most times the plastic coming from the machine is around 40-50% “recycled” plastic (in-plant regrind). I found their use of the word recycling to be slightly deceiving because while yes they were cycling plastic back into the system…it was still virgin material. It had never reached a consumer market and been recycled, the plastic had just remained in the plant. Berry plastic produces on average 10 million thermoformed cups per year! They also do not use any recycled materials from out of plant…! If there is a place that we as a society could make changes to lessen our damage on our environment it would be at this scale, at a place like Berry Plastics.