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As a plastics engineer, I am often asked about my opinion on the impact of plastics on the environment. Sustainability, “green”, renewable, and bio-based are all great buzzwords around company initiatives, but they often lack legs to survive when there is no commercial incentive to drive them forward into the marketplace. For me, sustainability must make “sense” to the business and the consumer. Legislation can incentivize or mandate change, but it is practical innovation that has the power to put the “sustain” in sustainability.

My role at Bixby International is the Application Development Engineer for our optical technology in the LED lighting market. LED lighting has already taken a huge step forward in delivering sustainable solutions to light our homes, roadways, and workplaces. LED luminaires require less energy to produce the same amount of light as their halogen, incandescent, and fluorescent counterparts. (See Table A) Not only does this decrease the carbon footprint by drawing less power from the grid, but it also has tangible benefits to the consumer through reduced energy bills. Compared to the common incandescent, LEDs are 83% more efficient¹. LEDs can also generate five times the light of an incandescent using the same wattage input. The key is being able to do more with less.

Table A¹

Annual cost of operation based on 800 lumens for 2 hours per day at $0.16 per kWh

Even with these energy-efficient innovations, lighting still makes up roughly 20% of global energy consumption. This greatly impacts our carbon footprint, with real costs to our companies, communities, and households. But what if we can do “more with less” in this sector? It is up to us to engineer more efficient, more valuable, more comfortable lighting solutions that are both human-centric in application and human-centric at the end-of-life cycle.

At Bixby, we have worked hard to deliver a product that keeps these concepts in mind, simultaneously improving our customers' products and honoring our responsibility as a manufacturer to minimize waste. We believe we have a lighting solution that blends commercial practicality and sustainability into a natural driver of change.

Manufacturing Innovation: From Pellet to Product in One Pass

Manufacturing requires substantial energy, and unless this energy comes from renewable sources, it incurs a carbon cost. At Bixby, our optical products are crafted from a monolayer acrylic sheet embossed with a custom, proprietary beam-shaping micro-texture. Within minutes, our raw feedstock pellets are melted, embossed, and cooled into diffusive sheet ready for our customer’s most demanding lighting applications. This method is significantly more efficient than other techniques used to transfer microstructures onto diffuser films and sheets like the “cast and cure” method.

The “cast and cure” process involves multiple steps:

1. Extruding a thick acrylic substrate
2. Extruding PET or acrylic casting film
3. UV casting and curing microstructures onto PET film
4. Laminating the PET/UV casted optical layer with the structural acrylic substrate

Each additional step requires more energy and typically generates more /setup/startup waste. Furthermore, having all these processes under one roof is rare, leading to increased transportation and petroleum consumption due to the need for multiple manufacturing facilities. Bixby’s streamlined approach reduces energy usage, waste, and environmental impact, showcasing our commitment to efficiency and sustainability.

 Thermoplastic Embossing: Eliminating the use of liquid UV casting resins

Bixby’s diffuser products stand out due to our innovative manufacturing technique where beam shaping elements are directly embossed onto acrylic sheets. This process eliminates the need for liquid chemicals typically used in traditional “casting”, sidestepping potential toxicological and environmental risks commonly associated with chemical use in production. Additionally, we utilize plastic pellets as our raw feedstock, carefully managed under our “clean-sweep” initiative to ensure they remain contained within the facility. Being located in the picturesque town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, we not only strive to protect the charm of our environment but also to maintain the integrity of our production space – ensuring no pellets are left on the shop floor. This meticulous attention to detail not only protects our scenic seacoast surroundings but also guards our bottom line by maximizing yield.

Monolayer: A Key Factor in Enhancing Sustainability

We’ve already explored how our monolayer manufacturing technology not only enhances efficiency and safety versus competitive products but also champions recyclability, both post-industrial and post-consumer. Our products drive light diffusion via custom optical patterns instead of using thermoset UV layer or specialized diffusive particulate additives, ensuring that the trim waste produced by our products is exceptionally pure and uncontaminated. This waste can be efficiently collected, reground, and reincorporated back into our extrusion process, or even sold into the generic acrylic waste stream for various applications. In contrast, thermoset UV cast diffusers and multi-material products hinder recycling efforts due to their inability to remelt and the contamination they introduce into the acrylic regrind. This is also a challenge with frosted and pigmented diffuser sheets. These may be recycled within the manufacturer’s walls, however, the diffusive additives compromise the purity and limit the material’s recyclability, especially for transparent applications that constitute a major portion of acrylic usage.

Design and Functionality: Extruded Sheets Enhance Modern Aesthetics

As lighting fixtures evolve to become thinner and sleeker, aligning perfectly with consumer preferences for minimalist designs, our approach remains at the forefront. Not only does this trend make for an appealing visual aesthetic, but it also results in the use of fewer materials and parts. Among the various methods such as blow molding, injection molding, and profile extrusion, flat sheet extrusion stands out as the most economical and efficient method to produce thin, diffusive sheet at scale. Adopting designs that leverage flat extruded sheet can help eliminate bulky fixtures with complex parts assemblies, streamlining production and reducing material use.

 Application Energy Consumption: Balancing Comfort and Efficiency

Bixby leads the market with optical diffuser products that skillfully balance efficacy and glare control – a dual benefit highly valued by customers. Our products maximize light direction precisely where needed while maintaining a pleasing aesthetic that diminishes glare. Traditional methods for LED lighting often compromise light transmission significantly in the quest for glare control, but Bixby’s diffuser sheets minimize this loss, propelling us ahead in the technological evolution of the industry. By optimizing energy consumption without sacrificing comfort, our diffuser sheets not only meet, but exceed current industry standards, providing efficient, effective lighting solutions.

References:

1. Shakir Williams, HomElectrical website, HomElectrical Electric Supply, accessed 16 May 2024, <https://www.homelectrical.com/cfls-vs-halogen-vs-fluorescent-vs-incandescent-vs-led.6.html>

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