TPE maker United Soft Plastics opens Texas manufacturing plant
Canadian Plastics
Automotive MaterialsThe company’s new Houston facility is nearly 20,000 square feet and has 10 million lbs production capacity.
Material supplier United Soft Plastics (USP), a manufacturer and custom compounder of TPEs, has opened a new 10 million lb production facility in Houston, Texas.
The new plant, which complements USP’s existing facility in Lawrenceville, Ga., consists of new state-of-the-art compounding equipment which expands production of the company’s portfolio of TPEs, including traditional SEBS-based TPE, TPO, TPU, and special products such as acrylic-based TPE compounds.
TPEs in an automotive interior.
Photo Credit: United Soft Plastics
“This investment reaffirms our continued commitment to the engineering TPE plastics market in the U.S., Mexico, and also outside of the Americas,” Benedict Herbst, USP’s executive vice president, said in a statement. “The expansion of our manufacturing assets will play a key role in meeting the application development needs of our customers and further unlock new business opportunities and maintain our superior customer response time.”
Herbst also said the new plant represents a strategic market repositioning which enables USP to move closer to raw material hubs and high-volume customer accounts in Mexico, the Southwest U.S., and also Asia. The company expects to hire up to 25 new production employees and possibly even further hiring as additional new lines come on-stream.
The new manufacturing facility will be run on a twin-screw extrusion system furnished by KraussMaffei Berstorff, equipped with an underwater pelletizer from Nordson. The nearly 20,000-square-foot plant is also equipped with testing equipment and a laboratory.
USP is headquartered in Lawrenceville, and develops TPE materials for use in injection molding, extrusion, and blow molding processes for the automotive, healthcare, electrical, electronic, construction, packaging, and consumer products industries.
