Materials
The Burgundy Gold Team have a broad range of expertise within the materials sector including polymers and coatings, adhesives, textiles and nonwovens and polymer recycling technologies.
Polymer Industry
The Polymer Sector comprises four discrete processing areas: Plastics Processing, Rubber Processing, Polymer Composite Processing and Composites. Just under 14,000 companies operate within the UK sector employing some 286,000 employees. This figure rises to approximately 400,000 employees when companies who process polymers as a secondary operation to their main business, are taken into consideration. The industry is extremely dynamic being subject to many changes and opportunities arising from technological change, development of new materials and processing technology and not least, the development of new products and changes in consumer requirements.
Paint and Coatings Industry
Worldwide, the paint and coatings industry is an important part of everyday living. Paint industry statistics confirm that no domestic or commercial arena remains unaffected, with applications ranging from household and decorative paints, to coatings used in the automotive industry; from the anti-contamination coatings in the canned foods sector, to the paints used to advertise corporate logos on airliners.
Textiles
The textiles and clothing industry is the UK's 9th largest manufacturing sector, and has a turnover of over £17.7 billion per year. In 1999 the industry exported £5.1 billion of goods. Since then the British textile industry has been hit by one of the deepest slumps in its history over the last 8 years. Total output has declined each year due to the severe competitive from low cost textile suppliers in other countries. However, in fashion design and innovation and in particular in medical textiles, performanace (sport and industrial) textiles and non-wovens a number of UKs companies continue to hold their own. Much of this development is in syntheric polymeric fibres and materials particularly for the consumer in the management comfort in the wide variety of pass times and working environments faced today. Another interesting development has been in the initial developments of SMART materials, for monitoring medical outputs and for example novel in-bult communication systems.
Polymer Recycling
The awareness of polymer recycling to consumers and industry alike has increased greatly over the last few years particularly relating to the volumes of packaging waste genrated each year. The public have been affected directly because of the changes being made to their door-step-collection systems and industry is looking closely as the waste created and the cost of disposal is clearly affecting their bottom line. In addition to waste resulting from packaging applications, other areas of high polymeric waste include: construction, automotive, agriculture and electrical components.