BP&R Editor Giulia Daniele toured the Rototek facilities and spoke with Shaun Mills, Operations Director, to learn more about the company’s core businesses, ongoing investments in smart machines and where opportunities lie for rotational moulders.
rototek
[GD] Rototek has grown into a significant technical rotational moulding operation over the past 30 years. What have been the biggest changes in the business during that time?
[SM] In the early days, Rototek designed and built some extremely advanced machinery in-house, including our own control systems. This enabled us to programme specific movements, rotation patterns and heating profiles within the ovens. As industry and customer requirements evolved, we realised machinery alone wasn’t enough. We started working more closely with material suppliers to develop polymers and compounds to our own specifications and explore new additives and material technologies. We’ve also worked with specialist toolmakers to look closely at the engineering behind the mould, designing out problems that would traditionally have been accepted as limitations within rotation moulding.
Process monitoring has been another major step forward. Our work with 493K and the use of internal temperature and process monitoring give us greater visibility into what is happening inside the mould. 493K’s technology is designed to monitor temperature and pressure, optimise heating and cooling cycles, reduce waste and improve process control. Today, Rototek has over 22 machines across two Nottinghamshire sites and manufactures over 100,000 products annually. What’s most important is that there isn’t one piece of technology that solves everything. It’s the combination of machine capability, control systems, materials, additives, tooling design, process monitoring and experienced people that allows us to solve our customers’ challenges.
[GD] What is driving demand for rotational moulding today, and where are you seeing the strongest growth in applications or sectors?
[SM] If you’d asked me this two years ago, I’d probably have said sustainability was one of the biggest drivers. There was a lot of interest in PCR, recycled content and alternative materials. That interest hasn’t disappeared, but the commercial reality has become much more important. Sustainable materials can come at an additional cost, and we’ve seen customers push back where they can’t justify that premium in the finished product. It’s a shame, but it doesn’t mean we should stop pushing in that direction. As a B Corp business, sustainability remains part of our long-term strategy. At the same time, regulation continues to encourage recycled content. We’re seeing strong opportunities in water retention, water storage and harvesting, as well as automotive and offshore/marine applications. Rotational moulding can bring real advantages in these areas because customers need large, durable and seamless components with complex geometries and excellent environmental resistance.
[GD] You’ve invested in the Persico SMART electrically heated machine. What does it change in practical terms for production, energy consumption and quality?
[SM] This is one of the developments I am most excited about because it represents a fundamental change in how we can rotationally mould a product. A traditional rotational moulding machine generally uses a gas-fired oven. It heats a large volume of air, which heats the tool, which then heats the polymer. The SMART machine uses Direct Tool Heating, with electrically controlled heating elements applying energy directly to the mould. Individual heating zones can be independently controlled, meaning we can put heat where and when it’s required instead of heating the whole mould.
This brings benefits in terms of energy efficiency and process control while giving engineers more freedom. We’re not using gas to heat a complete oven chamber and all the air around the tool, removing the direct CO2 emissions associated with burning gas at the machine. We can also control individual heating zones, monitor the process in real time and make the heating and cooling cycle more precise. This helps us achieve better wall-thickness control, reduce distortion and warping while improving consistency from one moulding to the next. Finally, we can look at multi-layer moulding, foam cores, advanced polymers and more difficult geometries that would be considerably harder to control using conventional technology.
[GD] What do you think the rotational moulding industry needs to do better over the next five to ten years?
[SM] Two challenges stand out: competitiveness and people. UK manufacturing needs internationally competitive energy costs. We need to continue supporting organisations such as the BPF in making the case for UK plastics manufacturing and for energy policies that allow British manufacturers to compete.
The second issue is our workforce. Rotational moulding has a tremendous amount of experience within it, but much of that knowledge sits with people who have been in the industry for over 20 years. We must ask ourselves: who is going to have that knowledge in another 10-20 years? Traditionally, rotational moulding can be a hot, physical and manual manufacturing environment, which doesn’t make it necessarily attractive. We need a proper long-term strategy around apprenticeships and engineering skills. We also need to show young people that modern rotational moulding is also about materials science, robotics, automation, software, process monitoring and advanced engineering. If we can’t attract enough people, automation becomes essential rather than an option. The strongest businesses will probably do both: bring young engineers into the industry while automating the repetitive, hot and physically demanding tasks that people shouldn’t need to be doing.
[GD] Looking ahead, what major developments will shape Rototek over the next few years?
[SM] Electrically heated moulding and automation. The former provides us with greater control over exactly where energy goes into a mould. Process monitoring gives us the data to understand what’s happening inside it. Automation offers the ability to repeat that process consistently. This combination should allow us to produce better-quality parts with greater repeatability and consistency, while reducing energy consumption, material waste and dependence on manual labour. Automation improves consistency, helps compensate for the industry’s skills shortage and allows skilled employees to spend more time on engineering, quality and problem-solving rather than repetitive manual operations. I don’t see automation as replacing the knowledge we’ve built up over the last 30 years. The technology is only valuable if you understand the process well enough to know what you’re asking it to do.
Rototek has been pushing the boundaries of rotational moulding through machinery, materials, tooling and process knowledge for 30 years. The next stage is bringing all of that together with electric heating, automation and data, so that we can produce increasingly technical parts with less material and energy, greater consistency and less reliance on manual processes.