Last week I had the pleasure of touring Medline’s local plastic injection moulding plant; a long time customer of my associate. Since I don’t usually work on the industrial/manufacturing side of the oil business, I was very excited to see another way that oil is impacting our everyday lives!

If you look around the room where you are currently sitting, you might see a lot of plastic objects. Maybe the trash can is made of molded plastic, your cup of pens on your desk, your water bottle, and maybe your phone case or keyboard depending on how you are reading this post. How do they get it to form onto its specific shape you might wonder?

Plastic Injection Moulding has become one of the main ways our most common goods are made.  By definition, Injection Moulding is – “a manufacturing process for producing parts by injecting molten material into a mould. Injection moulding can be performed with a host of materials mainly including metals, glasses, elastomers, confections, and most commonly thermoplastic and thermosetting polymers”.

In the case of Medline and the hospital supplies they produce, our material starts as a few different types of plastic polymers (copolymer, hopolymer, HDPE, & crystal styrene) that arrive by railcar to their facility.

The polymers are offloaded into large silos next to the building. When the silo’s are full, they can weigh upwards of 80,000lbs! Our tour guide told us a story from when he first started on the job many years ago, he unloaded a rail car into the wrong silo and cost the company $100,000 to fix the error! They must be a wonderful employer since he is still an employee!

The first item we witnessed being made was this measuring cup:

The polymers are melted down to a liquid and if needed, a dye is added; in this case, the bright blue color of the lid. Then the liquid mix is pressed into its mold and instantly flash cooled.

As you can see, a LOT of hydraulic components are used in the automation of this process.

The same process is repeated in different molds, using different dyes, with different types of polymers for other products. Below they are making little tubs:

They also made medicine cups:

and bed pans:

The bedpan machine needs to be cleaned once per week and the process takes 6 hours! Can you imagine what the hourly cost of downtown is for any machine in this plant?

Every single item in production gets its picture taken for a quality check as its coming down the line, which you can see if you look carefully for a quick flash in each video. Each piece not meeting standards is placed aside for recycling:

Then the items are boxed up for shipping:

A “clean room” is used for certain items that need to remain sterile.

The oils used in a plant like this include hydraulic oil, gear oil, turbine oil, and grease.

Specifically:

• Tellus S4 ME 46 (Synthetic hydraulic oil)
• Tellus S2 MX 46 & 68 (Regular hydraulic oil)
• Shell Turbo T 32 (Turbine Oil)
• Shell Omala S2 GX 220 & 320 (Gear Oil)

Each machine holds between 150 and 500 gallons of oil, and with 36 machines in the plant, this totals around 12,000 gallons of oil in the entire process! A customer with a large operation like this understands the cost savings of using a high quality product. In fact, the same exact product has been flowing through a few of the machines for over 7 years! In conjunction with quality low micron filters, the oil is still incredibly clean. The synthetic oils are the lighter colored bottles:

Shell Tellus S4 ME 46 was chosen for energy cost savings and improved production life back in 2012.  Tests were ran, monitored, and measured with an AMP meter, and a 5.08% savings in power per year was obtained for Machine #24 alone.  An average savings of $30,000/year per machine!

And in case you are a safety director watching these videos, you can be rest assured, proper PPE was provided by Medline for us and all employees. We were required to wear hair nets, safety glasses, and ear plugs throughout the tour. It was clear to me, that safety is at the forefront of all that Medline does. They had SDS sheets posted at every turn and clearly marked walkways for workers.

I hope you enjoyed this quick breakdown of an immensely complicated and expensive process. Just another fascinating example of Oil in Action!