Chroma expands its production capabilities

Color, special effect and specialty additive supplier Chroma Corporation has added six new extruders to their production facility in McHenry, Ill., to enable the company to expand its small order segment and just-in-time shipments of small lot color concentrates.

While this additional capacity is suited for all resin types they are designed to handle Chroma’s rapidly expanding engineering resin business. “Chroma’s engineering resin business has been growing faster than all of the other resin types in each of the last four years, so we needed to expand our capabilities in this area,” said Tom Bolger, the company’s president and CEO. Colors and compounds for polycarbonate, polysulphone, polyethersulfone, nylon and polyester engineering resins have grown at a rate of 20 per cent per year, he added.

The capacity addition comes on the heels of the company recently completing a laboratory expansion, which more than doubled the size of its color development laboratory and added six new 38-ton injection molding machines.