Global Injection Molding Plastics Market Expected to Reach
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Injection molding is thriving and innovating. The global injection molded plastics market is expected to grow from last year’s market size of $357.34 billion to reach $476.46 billion by 2028.
Injection molding is a manufacturing method for engineering plastics. The process involves injecting molten plastic into a mold tool and then ejecting it once it becomes a solidified part.
Because the method utilizes the same mold tool to manufacture each part, injection molding offers quality that is consistent across production runs. This makes it suitable for a wide variety of industries where quality is paramount. For instance, the healthcare industry uses injection molding to manufacture plastic syringes, prosthetics, and medical procedure tools, among other products. Injection molding is also used in such fields as agriculture, automotive, electronics, toy making, and construction.
Industry 4.0 is shaping the field today. Smart injection molding machines are being developed to provide increasing automation capabilities.
“My degree is specifically in plastics engineering, and there’s work we do on a daily basis here that I didn’t even know was possible when I studied this,” says Kyra Stawson, a technical sales engineer at Xometry, an industrial parts marketplace that provides manufacturing on demand.
Stawson shared with us the biggest trend she’s seeing in the injection molding field and how Xometry, which offers instant quotes for injection molding parts and DFM feedback, is staying ahead of the curve.
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Thomas Insights (TI): What trends are you seeing right now in injection molding?
Kyra Stawson (KS): More and more applications are going to plastic. People are starting to make aerospace components out of plastic. Things you would normally see in the past several decades that were made out of metal are starting to go towards plastic to achieve lightweight applications and cost-effective applications.
TI: How is Xometry adapting to trends and innovating in the injection molding sphere?
KS: Xometry is really staying ahead of the curve. If we get a new project that we don’t have much experience with as a company, we are going to find a partner or a molder who specializes in that and onboard them for future projects as well.
Technology is always advancing, especially in this industry. We want to maintain that head start and make sure that we’re well suited when the opportunity arises again in the future, because I’m sure if we get one question regarding a certain process or certain capability that we don’t have, we’re probably going to get more in the future too. We want to be prepared.
TI: How is Xometry uniquely positioned to innovate?
KS: I took a deep dive into our injection molding internal team, and we have so many different backgrounds that came to this company. For example, I come from an automotive background. We have people that come from the medical industry. It’s a really versatile team that we’ve put together here.
Collectively on that team, we have close to 250 years of experience in the injection molding industry. We can work collectively as a team and come up with solutions no matter what the situation is.
TI: Do you have any case studies that illustrate how your services are advancing clients’ goals?
KS: We have a couple of case studies published on our website that cover a few different types of industries that we service with our injection molding services.
Image Credit: Rogue Ace Photography / Shutterstock.com