The goal
Adept recognises the importance to both our processing plant customers and the wider rendering and pet food industries in reducing plastic waste and minimising plastic foreign body contamination.
We began investigating and trialling degradable alternatives to traditional thermoplastics that were commercially available however nothing met our specific requirements.
This led us to embark on a journey to develop our own water soluble material to meet our and the animal processing industries unique needs.
Soluble Material
The requirements
To be successful we needed to achieve the following objectives:
DEGRADABLE IN WATER
Compostable plastics, such as PLA were unsuitable for our purpose as they do not degrade quickly. We needed a solution that remained functional long enough to fulfil its purpose then degraded quickly in processing plant conditions through a combination of moisture and heat.
EFFECTIVE
The mechanical properties of the material needed to be as close to conventional thermoplastics as possible yet set new standards for reduced environmental impact.
SAFE TO USE
All the constituents of the new soluble material needed to be recognised as food safe and compliant to global regulatory standards.
COST EFFECTIVE
We needed a material that was cost effective so that it could be accepted and adopted by the processing industry.
The result: ADSOL
We began with trials to develop and verify the use of various suitable food grade fillers in combination with existing water-soluble food grade material technology.
This lead to the successful development of a water soluble material that met our requirements, which we named ADSOL. We then needed to find a way to make ADSOL production feasible on a commercial scale. It became clear that for the project to be commercially viable we would need to implement a manufacturing system that enabled us to produce the material ourselves.
An investment was made in our own material compounder where the food grade raw materials are mixed, compounded, and extruded into injection mouldable pellets. Today, we can produce our ADSOL water soluble material at a rate of 100kg/hour.
Currently Adept sells over 30 million ADSOL soluble products per year to satisfied customers across the world.
