Styropack invests in r&d

Styropack, has marked the start of its new investment programme with an injection of £30,000 (€43.9m) towards the company's national design and test centre in Lancashire and its client base throughout the UK.

As a leading moulder and supplier of expanded polystyrene (EPS) packaging, Styropack has acquired the latest in cutting kit technology; an American-manufactured Computer Numerical Control (CNC) cutting kit that the company says will deliver prototypes, however complicated, in a far more efficient and effective manner.

The cutting kit has several competitive advantages. With a surface area of 1300mm x 1400mm and an extended gantry, the kit can cut up to 240mm deep and has the time saving factor of being able to machine directly from a 3D file without the need for dimensional 2D drawings.

According to Lee Robinson, Styropack's product development manager, customers based in the many different industry sectors, from fishing to pharmaceuticals as well as food and beverage, will reap the time saving benefit.

He said: "Styropack offers an unrivalled core design facility here in Blackburn. Creative and tangible solutions are matched with quality products that meet the needs of our clients nationwide. This latest investment provides us with a core competitive edge. The key fixture of the kit is its automatic tool charger that enables us to run projects unsupervised and therefore overnight, meeting as we expect completion dates ahead of schedule. Such is the technological advancement of this piece of kit that we can now complete sets of samples in days as opposed to weeks and as a result invest more time in developing new product designs."​

Styropack is the leading moulder of expanded polystyrene (EPS) packaging in the UK and one of the largest in Europe. The company employs 350 people and has an annual turnover of £33 million. Styropack is part of the international Synbra Group, one of Europe's top suppliers of EPS packaging, insulation and plastics.