Founding & requirements of starting a plastics product factory : Case Hämeen Lanka

Abstract

This thesis is a study on finding a suitable product or product group to manufacture at an predefined domestic factory site, which offers certain infrastructural services, but simultaneously has its own drawbacks.The main objects of the thesis is to provide feasibility of producing plastic goods in Finland, analyse and define a suitable product or product group. A suitable manufacturing process and raw material must be chosen, and a layout of the factory must be defined to produce these goods. Lastly, profitability calculations based on the product or product group have been made to estimate if its manufacture is profitable enough to execute. Research for this thesis has been conducted by factory visits, field studies and observations, interviewing experts in the field and fellow students, literature studies, drawings and calculations covering profitability, required manpower, and raw material pricing and production machinery were based on life-like figures.

As an result, a suitable product was found, the manufacture of preforms to produce beverage bottles mainly for domestic producers. The study covers several scenarios on production, what kind of production methods were considered and what kind of methods can be possibly used to decrease the production costs. The author concludes that the biggest profitability factor is raw material costs, and their vigorous fluctuations. Thus the increasing research into bioplastics and their future possibilities of utilisation is vital and important also to improve the preforms environmentally-friendliness, their biggest current drawback being carbon dioxide permeability.