Who is Berry Plastics? They are a plastic company that focuses primarily on food-ware, usually cups. They work for large and small restaurants producing these highly-disposable products in today's society. Berry Plastics has 75 plants worldwide, and is the largest consumer of polyethylene in North America, if not the world.
The have 3 methods of production; injection molding, thermoplastic, and dry printing. To form their plastic (which is outsourced or recycled from the waste of a previous product), in thermoplastics they have a lid line, which is a sheet of plastic that gets heated and molded simultaneously several times into lid-sheets. They add details each time it's molded. There was 65 million pounds of material in the thermoform sector consumed just this year. With injection molding, they melt plastic pellets and push them into molds under high amounts of pressure. They have a "Hot Runner" system which heats up the plastic to 500 degrees fahrenheit. At the end of each line of products, there is a precision cutter that cuts on a preset path. In the printing section, they use inks that cure instantly under UV lights, and they cure 100-500 cups a minute on just one machine. They use the PMS color system, with color heads on each machine to hold ink.
1.5-2 million cups are produced per line a day, with 10 million cups being sent out of the factory as a whole per day. Thats a massive amount of production for a massive amount of consumption... This entire operation (especially the numerical figures) are major causes of concern for me about our consumer culture. To live in a world where this is socially acceptable, or even socially celebrated is sickening. Where does all that waste go? People don't think about those types of things here in America. However, our waste has devastating impacts on the other countries of the world, especially the poor ones.
-Randa
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