Tubes: A Clear Breakthrough
By John Conroy
World Wide Packaging (Florham Park, NJ) is touting a manufacturing breakthrough that uses a unique process to fuse a slant-tip thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) flexible tube head onto a tube sleeve, says Jeffrey Hayet, executive vice president of global sales.
Most manufacturers would use friction-fitting to attach a TPE tube head to a tube body, says Hayet. World Wide’s technology for fusing the TPE tube head directly onto a tube body took more than two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in R&D time to develop, he says. “What makes our technology patented and unique is that we injection-mold the head out of elastomer, and then we fuse the tube head to the tube sleeve, just like a traditional manufacturer would do for a standard tube head. The difference is that traditional manufacturers can’t do this with an elastomer tube head, fusing it to a polyethylene tube body.”
Hayet believes one of the most striking aspects of the new tube head is that its TPE has the clarity that traditional polyethylene-based tube heads lack. “You can’t identify the color of the product through it,” he says of the traditional head. “In this case, there are gigantic advantages. The tube head has fantastic clarity so that you can actually see the shade of the product through the head.”
A Fortune 500 multinational based in the United States will begin shipping the TPE slant-tip tubes in the latter part of 2008, Hayet says, who is excited about future possibilities. He says that the company will be able to produce the TPE tube heads in a range of styles, for use in dermatological products such as facial anti-aging creams, he says, or give the head texture so that it can be used for massaging creams into pores and facial lines.
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