The LuxTek vision goes back to the founding year 2004, when we started with a lot of motivation, enthusiasm, and a clear idea: to create solutions with sustainable products. We have kept this idea until today and live it every day. But what exactly does that mean?
Despite its immense potential and versatility, plastic still has a somewhat negative connotation. Prejudices such as “everlasting”, “polluter of the sea” or “too costly production” have always accompanied the material. If you go back 20 years and compare the environmental awareness of that time with that of today, this may not have been entirely wrong. Over the years, however, global perceptions and the way we treat our planet have changed. There is still a long way to go, but the realization that we have to do something has become and is becoming stronger every year.
A not insignificant contribution on the way to more sustainability is provided by innovative companies like LuxTek.
Starting with the distribution of merchandise, through the purchase of the first processing equipment, to the complete production of products made of polyethylene, LuxTek has constantly developed – always driven by the vision to tackle challenges and solve problems with sustainable products.
As an industry leader in floor protection and support technology, LuxTek has been working extremely successfully for nearly two decades to replace steel or wood products on a large scale with pressed plastic. Through continuous development and optimization of our process, the mechanical properties of our polyethylene plastic are in no way inferior to those of steel. Key parameters such as strength, toughness, load distribution, etc. approach steel, but with decisive advantages in handling: plastic is much lighter, plastic does not oxidize, and plastic can be used again and again.
LuxTek products are already used in numerous industries, where they create innovative solutions. For example, through individual scrapers in the wood industry, wear liners in the materials handling industry, food safe cutting boards in the food industry or special material boards in the stamping industry. To name just a few examples of applications.
In terms of our products, the answer is as simple as it is ingenious. All our products are part of a cycle and are reprocessed at the end of their respective life cycles.
Let’s illustrate this very theoretical approach with the example of one of our core products: a support pad for cranes.
To produce the plate, we first need the raw material polyethylene HMW or UHMW (high molecular weight or ultra-high molecular weight compressed) in ground or powdered form. The raw material is then processed into a base plate at LuxTek in our sintering press.
The thickness of the plate depends on the product and can vary from 10 mm to 120 mm. The surface of the base plate is then planed smooth and cut exactly to size. In the final production step, the base plate is then milled to size using CNC equipment and, if necessary, radii or individual logos are integrated. The material chips produced during the production process are all collected and re-compressed.
The now finished support pad is delivered to the customer and provides many years of faithful service. If at some point the support pad has reached the end of its life cycle, there are now two options.
Since LuxTek offers its customers to take back the purchased products at the end of their service life, the first option is that this support pad now comes back to us and we feed it back into our production process in the form of regrind. The life cycle starts all over again.
The second option would be for the end-of-life support pad from our example to go to a plastic recycler instead of LuxTek. These buy used plastic worldwide in all grades such as PE, PP, PVC, POM, etc. and purchase it in unsorted form in all imaginable variations – containers, pipes, films, plates, canisters, CD cases, etc. The recyclers sort the plastics, cut them up and grind them. The resulting ground material now goes back to companies like LuxTek as raw material.
The term “sustainability” has become overused and cannot function without considering the energy balance of the company and that of the products.
The LuxTek vision is that not only our products have a positive energy balance, but that the entire company is CO2 neutral:
This list is by no means exhaustive but represents only a small part of the ideas and LuxTek’s claim to be a 100% sustainable company. We want to continuously develop ourselves and our processes to create sustainable and innovative products that add value to society and specifically solve our customers’ problems. We started in 2004 with this vision and are now consistently driving forward its implementation.