Americhem U Back in Session

Last week, Americhem U kicked off its Winter/Spring season with a class on “Designing Color Masterbatches,” taught by Americhem color and synthetic fibers expert Roger Threadgill. It was nice to see Americhem U back in session in Dalton, Georgia, where we’ve been teaching color classes to industry professionals since 2011. During that time, we’ve taught 23 classes to almost 700 industry professionals focusing on topics such as color trends, color measurement, color tolerancing, weathering and polymeric additives.

This year, our classes are being held at a new location, the Dalton Golf and Country Club. Participants enjoyed the nearly hour-long presentation before networking with other professionals in the carpet and synthetic turf industries during a buffet lunch. We have found that this “lunch and learn” format helps educate while keeping up with the developments within the industry.

We learn much through our interactions with those who attend Americhem U classes. In fact, we survey participants at every class, and the subsequent year of classes is determined by those that we survey. We teach the classes quarterly in Dalton, semi-annually in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio (near Cleveland) and, for customers of Americhem, we’ll even bring Americhem U to you at your plant or office. We’ve also instituted a series of Americhem U webinars that can be attended anywhere there’s a good internet connection.

Color is a complicated subject and it has a huge impact in the manufacturing arena. We pride ourselves on helping you to understand color’s many facets and how you can get color to help you sell your products, no matter what industry you’re in.

For more information, visit www.americhem.com/americhemu or contact me by posting a comment below.

 

Scott Blanchard

Corporate Marketing & Communications Manager

Achieving ISO 14001: How Americhem Goes Green

We are excited to announce that we have recently received the ISO 14001 certification for our Suzhou, China, manufacturing plant. This standard recognizes our special focus on environmental management to ensure social 
well-being in addition to business goals.

“The certification of compliance with ISO 14001 recognizes that the policies, practices and procedures of our plant highlight our commitment to environmental protection,” said Stanley

Teoh, Americhem’s vice president and managing director for the Asia Pacific region. “With this certification, our customers can rest assured that our plant exercises the highest level of dedication to our environment through waste reduction, energy efficiency, green business initiatives, safe work practices and sustainable development.

Environmental responsibility is an integral element in Americhem's Company Principles. Our dedication has resulted in numerous successful programs to reduce waste streams and energy usage. Our ongoing objectives include: 

• Utilizing our expertise in new product development to fuel the engineering of greener products
• Developing more efficient end-to-end supply chains for less waste
• Continually improving energy efficiencies in plants and offices
• Implementing recycling programs for everything from drums and scrap metal to wood pallets
• Planning extensively for spill containment and hazardous waste disposal
• Ensuring all global regulatory and reporting requirements are met both within the US and abroad

One of our biggest company initiatives to encourage environmentally friendly practices and manufacturing methods is our promotion of the solution dyeing of synthetic fibers. With a solution dye process you not only see better quality, but the process preserves more natural resources.

Post dyeing is the process by which finished white yarn is colored with liquid dyes after the fiber is made.  This process leads to an extraordinary amount of water being used and a huge amount of that water being permanently polluted.

Solution dyeing, which adds the colorant from a masterbatch to the fiber as its being spun, presents a more eco-friendly alternative. No water is used during the solution dyeing process and very little water is used in the overall process.  It has been estimated that the overall water consumption in post dyeing is one hundred times greater than that of using masterbatch in the solution dye process.

Solution dye not only saves water during the process, it also saves energy. By combining fiber spinning and coloring into one step, the amount of energy used is considerably reduced. This one-step process also means that no additional equipment is needed, whereas the spinning and coloring steps in post-dyeing each require their own special equipment.

Americhem is continually improving our practices to encourage environmental sustainability, and we look forward to sharing these practices with our customers.

To learn more about Americhem’s dedication to the environment, read our Environmental Policy.