Reducing your plastic landfill waste is no small feat, especially if one of your key product
components is plastic. But the Blackmer® team at our PSG Grand Rapids facility has developed
a new manufacturing method that reduces plastic waste by 5,000 lbs per year.
Duravane plastic material is used to make the sliding vanes that play a critical role in the
operation of Blackmer® Sliding Vane Pump technology. With over 200,000 vanes manufactured
per year at the PSG Grand Rapids facility, a considerable
amount of Duravane waste is produced.
However, instead of throwing away the Duravane waste, we are now recycling it and placing it
back into the molding process.
With this new manufacturing method, we take plastic Duravane waste and regrind them into
pellets, mix the recycled pellets with new pellets and use that mix of pellets to manufacture new
Duravanes. The new Duravane composed of recycled material passes all the same tensile
strength tests as the original Duravanes – with a 15% to 20% regrind threshold. Reusing our
plastic material instead of throwing it away allows for an efficient solution that optimizes our
operation while ensuring the same high-quality material as the original Duravane.
To learn more about the vanes in Blackmer Sliding Vane Pumps, click here, and to see what makes Blackmer Sliding Vane Pumps stand above the competition,
click here.