Plastics By Design Ltd Leads the Way to Provide Face Shields for the NHS Nurses Tackling Coronavirus

Plastics By Design is producing protective PPE face shields to keep our NHS and service workers safe. We're making the visor super comfortable by adding foam and elastic strapping, and making them in super clear PET. We now have the capacity to make 50,000 visors a day. The first prototype was printed laser cut and assembled in less than 24 hours after receiving the design file, thanks to 3D printing technology and the strength of Ricoh’s supplier network, Plastics By design and Waddington Europe. Having refined the design to enhance comfort and reduce contamination, the face shield has now been approved for production. It is estimated that in London alone, more than 150,000 face guards will be used every day in the battle against COVID-19. As one of Europe’s leading thermoforming packaging company, Waddington Europe and Plastics By Design ltd has joined forces with longstanding customer and partner, Ricoh 3D, to help bolster the national manufacturing and supply chain effort to provide supplies of personal protective equipment for the NHS in a bid to help meet urgent demand caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. 3D printing specialist, Ricoh 3D, were first approached on Monday 23rd March by The Royal London Hospital. Since then, countless NHS trusts and medical establishments have requested face shields, with Ricoh initially mass producing 40,000 face shields per week, with the aim of ramping production up to 50,000 per day over the next couple of weeks. Only 16 days after the initial request was made to Plastics By Design Ltd, Waddington Europe was primed to go into full production by Wednesday 8th April, having swiftly sourced the necessary materials and subsequently producing the plastic visor component of the face shield. Mark Dickin, Additive Manufacturing & Moulding Specialist at Ricoh 3D, says: “Our site is uniquely set up to take a product from concept to prototype to serial production, and that is exactly what we have done here in a very short timeframe. This really is a testimony to the strength of our suppliers like Plastics by Design and Waddington Europe relations and the cross-functional team who made it happen so quickly. Local suppliers for the foam, elastic strapping and visor components, have come forward across our production print, design solutions and quality assurance networks. We were seeing reports of nurses’ faces being cut and bruised by their existing protective equipment. Our frontline workers are battling enough already, without having to tend to sore and swollen faces at the end of a 12-hour shift. We knew our Polypropylene material was ideally suited for the job with its flexible, lightweight, watertight and fatigue resistant nature. Given its comparable properties to injection moulding, we had no doubts that this was the right material to support the transition to full moulded production.” Together, we can help fight the global pandemic that is Coronavirus. Please call Plastics By Design Ltd on 01380827022, or email sales@plasticsbydesign.co.uk for any and all plastic production enquiries, including but not limited to plastic face shields and visors.

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