Small Business: 3D printing plastic packaging

Mathew Mannington, a director and technical manager at Waipak.

This week, a look into how companies are using 3D printing in their operations.

Mathew Mannington is a director and technical manager of Waipak, which manufactures rigid plastic packaging for customers in the food, beverage and chemicals industries. The Hastings-based company has 26 staff.

When and why did you start looking into 3D printing technology with your business?

We've always used 3D modelling in this industry. In the old days we used pattern makers, who would take a lump of wood and machine it to create a model of a finished product that you could give to your customer so they got a sense of the look and feel. But that wasn't a very practical process because it was expensive and took weeks.

When 3D printing technology came out - this was around eight years ago - it made that process much quicker, so you could have something printed in one week, versus 10. But initially the cost was still the same, if not more, than a wooden model and it was all outsourced because the technology was all very new.

But as time has gone on the technology has changed to make it more affordable, to the point where now you can buy a 3D printing machine from the local stationery shop and it does the job. We're now using the technology a lot; we've got two printers that run pretty much all day five days a week.

What are you using them for?

Predominantly we're using them to make samples for customers. So if they want a new product - a new bottle or container - we can print some samples off for them that are geometrically identical to the final product, but made of this printed material. The ease of printing gives them the opportunity to make heaps of design mistakes at very little cost until they get to something that's going to work for them.

But we've also been doing a lot of development work around what else we can do with printers. That's more interesting from our point of view; anyone can print a sample, but we're also trying to replace production moulds with printed moulds.

Our industry typically requires that we buy a really expensive mould that you use to make a product; they can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take months to build. And once you've got it it's like buying a big house, you don't want to shift out of it a year later - you want to use it until it's finally dead and most of them last 10 years. But a lot of customers don't want to do that; they want to have new products on the shelves every year or so.

What results have you seen so far from that development work?

We've been developing a method to print production moulds out of this 3D printing process and we've had some reasonable results. We've pushed the boundaries in terms of the quality we can get from the technology we've currently got, and so far it's good enough for sampling but not yet for an end-consumer product.

We've been working at this for a couple of years, and we're pretty sure that next year there will be some other developments in 3D printing technology that will allow us to get to that end-product point.

There are some really cool developments on the horizon with 3D printing systems that use lasers or liquids, but what we've been focused on is trying to utilise the technology we've got available now and enhancing it with things like surface coatings to improve the finish.

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What have you learnt so far about getting the most out of this technology for your business?

Anyone can buy a printer and plug it in, but at the moment it seems there's more value in the IP that's being created by people finding different ways to use them. Around New Zealand there are a lot of people that have managed to do some amazing things with these machines by changing the materials they're using to print with, or altering the software - all sorts of crazy things. Then each year a new machine will come out that has incorporated those things that people have learned - it's all moving so fast.

There's a lot of human capital involved in getting the most out of this technology. Luckily it's interesting work, so it's no trouble to get people in the business on board to own it. What's also happening is the suppliers of these machines have realised that, and are trying to gather that information and share it between customers. We've been through quite a lot of printer suppliers and we've settled on [technology distributor] Comworth; you've got to find a partner that knows the product and can help you work with it.

What are some future opportunities you see for this technology in your industry?

We really think that in maybe 20, 30 or 40 years' time our traditional industry - which is made up of a lot of expensive processing machines that we put moulds into - will be replaced by printers that produce finished products, and the quality will be as good, if not better, than what we're currently producing. We've got a 3000 square metre building, but with really good 3D printing technology in the future you might be able to do that out of a 100 square metre building.