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Strongly supporting customers in adopting recycled plastics with consistent-quality materials and custom-tailored molding conditions
＼Our expert team handles inquiries
on technical partnerships and joint research.／
Intelligent Recycled Plastic is an end-to-end solution for using recycled plastics that combines material quality stabilization through proprietary sensing technology and AI with proposals of molding conditions optimized for each customer. Konica Minolta handles everything from developing material formulations that meet customer requirements and stabilizing material quality to optimizing molding conditions at the customer’s site, so customers can start using recycled plastics while keeping the time and effort required for evaluation to a minimum. As a new series that adds AI to Matelier®, the recycled plastics business Konica Minolta has developed based on its technologies for upgrading material properties, it takes the adoption of recycled plastics one step further.
Unlike petroleum-derived virgin materials, recycled plastics are made from waste plastics whose quality varies from lot to lot. This variation is the biggest barrier to adopting recycled plastics. Molding materials with inconsistent quality causes defects that were not anticipated with virgin materials, which reduces part yield and equipment utilization. When customers consider adopting recycled plastics in response to environmental regulations and other factors, they often select them based on catalog specifications and cost, as with conventional material selection. In many such cases, however, stable mass production cannot be achieved during part processing, and part costs increase as a result.
Conventional recycled plastic production has mainly relied on stabilizing quality by carefully selecting the waste plastics used as raw materials. With this method, however, only waste materials in good condition are reused, so resources cannot be fully utilized. The supply of high-quality waste plastics is limited, and competition to secure these resources is expected to intensify as the use of recycled plastics expands.
This solution takes a different approach by focusing on the manufacturing process itself that turns waste plastics into recycled plastics. AI optimizes the condition settings from compounding through molding, which stabilizes the quality of recycled plastics while enabling the use of grades of waste plastics that have not previously been used for high-performance parts.
Why can Konica Minolta offer this solution? In addition to the expertise it has built as a leading company in environmental management in the manufacturing industry*, Konica Minolta has a technology platform that integrates the materials, sensing, and AI technologies it has refined since its founding.
Another major strength is that Konica Minolta not only possesses these technologies but has also put them into practice and verified them repeatedly at the manufacturing sites of its MFPs, measuring instruments, and high-performance materials. Konica Minolta is both a supplier of recycled plastics and a user that adopts them in its own MFPs. For this reason, unlike material manufacturers that only sell recycled plastics, Konica Minolta understands what the real bottlenecks are when adopting them.
*Konica Minolta ranked first in the manufacturing sector of the company rankings in the 22nd Nikkei Environmental Management Survey (conducted in 2019) by Nikkei Inc., for the third time overall.
This solution is built on two core technologies, both of which take an intelligent, AI-based approach.
In recycled plastic manufacturing, Konica Minolta applies AI at two stages and combines it with its established sensing technology to achieve consistent quality.
First, waste plastics are measured with a proprietary measurement device, and AI estimates their physical properties from the resulting data. Next, based on the estimated properties, AI derives the manufacturing conditions for recycled pellets that meet the target physical property values.
Because variations in raw materials are absorbed through the manufacturing conditions, highly robust recycled plastics can be manufactured consistently.
Recycled plastics are also more difficult to handle than virgin materials in the part molding process. Molding conditions need to be optimized according to variations in material quality, but this has typically relied either on trial and error, which causes material loss and reduces equipment utilization, or on adjustments based on the experience and intuition of skilled technicians.
In addition to supplying recycled plastics, this solution proposes molding conditions optimized for each customer’s parts and molds.
This is supported by two types of data. AI analyzes detailed manufacturing data on recycled plastics produced with Konica Minolta technology, together with molding experiment data obtained through a proprietary experimental method, and derives highly robust molding conditions.
This shortens the transition from prototyping to mass production and improves equipment utilization during mass production. Konica Minolta goes beyond delivering materials and helps customers reach the point where they can use recycled plastics consistently.
By helping customers use recycled plastics consistently with this solution, Konica Minolta will contribute to realizing a sustainable society through solving their challenges. In particular, Konica Minolta aims to support deployment in the automotive industry, where EU regulations are driving demand for higher recycled plastic content, and in the growing electronics and home appliance markets in Asia.
＼Our expert team handles inquiries
on technical partnerships and joint research.／
