Reduced carboard usage, improved recyclability, and e-commerce friendly, are some of the initiatives leaded by PDM to help our customers achieve their sustainability goals defined on their strategic plan. Plastek of Mexico´s (PDM) engineering team have been working along with our costumer’s packaging, logistics and engineering teams proposing practical solutions to solve and help reach their short and midterm sustainability goals, matching the cost and e-commerce requirements.

To reduce the usage of water and wood consuming cardboard boxes, Plastek has proposed and implemented a solution of returnable collapsible totes that eliminates the use of boxes and wood pallets with a packaging that is able to return hundreds of times in a good and safe way, reducing cost due to labor shortages to assemble and disassemble boxes and reducing overall pack out. Also, this solution has a very attractive payback time.

Recyclability goals demand an easier way to re-process the packaging, meanwhile some packaging solutions, designed in the past, have a mix of different plastics that are difficult to separate, to be recycled efficiently on the user side or on the recycler side. Plastek de Mexico has helped their costumer to find low-cost solutions to make mono-material package, taking advantage of existing molds and working on finding the right set of resin grades.

Packages able to cope with the logistics of e-commerce, is a matter of survival for our customers. Due to the Covid pandemic, the e-commerce sales channel has duplicated and will keep a growing trend, resulting on products traveling long distances with additional mechanical stress before reaching final users. Closures are subjected to fail under shipping and handling supply chains that were not a problem in other selling channels. Plastek de Mexico responds by finding the right resin and design improvements on existing product to keep current aesthetics, improve resistance and opening force, keeping current cost, and avoiding high expenses to develop new designs.

At PDM we are convinced that this is the right path to jointly with our clients, achieve practical, fast and manageable cost solutions that allow us to achieve the medium and long-term goals that clients and the market demand.