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Agriligna Raw Material
The use of wood in polymers is nothing new and has been used for many years as a cheap filler. However, It was only during the past ten years that the use of wood as the primary ingredient in extrusion compounds started taking the stage.
Gone are the days of wood as a cheap filler, substituting polymer, and here are the days of extrudable and injection mouldable wood as a substitute for both traditional polymers, as well as natural wood.
The benefits of having an extrudable or injection mouldable wood is obvious in the savings in labour and machining costs, but even further than this, it opens up a whole new market to the polymer industry previously occupied almost exclusively by natural wood.
Starting in 1998, Agriligna set out to develop this technology using local expertise and patents in order to make these new exciting products available to the South African polymer industry.
In 2002 this dream became a reality with the start-up of the first plant to manufacture wood plastic composites (WPC) in Africa.
Today, with its plant in Modimolle (Nylstroom), Limpopo, Agriligna is one of the leading suppliers of wood plastic composites to the Southern African market - and manufacturer of Ecowood®profiles!
Currently Agriligna provides compounds for the following:
 Extrusion
Injection-moulding
These compounds are primarily in pine colour, but other colours are also available.
Agriligna compounds contain between 50% and 75% natural fibre. Depending on the specific requirements of the end-product, various polymers can be used as the base for the composites, but in general patented crosslinked HDPE and PVC are used.
The material is sold as a basic compound to enable customers to do their own in-house development for their specific end-product requirements. Agriligna collaborates closely with interested parties in the development of their particular products based on its own in-house capacity in this field. In this regard Agriligna assists interested parties with:
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Optimising the design of the product by taking into account the unique characteristics of WPC as a material,
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Closely following the cost implications of the design, the WPC compound to be used and the particular conversion technique to be used in order to optimise the economics of the process,
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Getting the dies or moulds made through manufacturers that Agriligna identified as reliable and competent,
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Running experimental trials in-house on the Agriligna conversion equipment to test the dies and moulds,
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Assisting clients of Agriligna’s compounds with the introduction pf the compound’s conversion on the client’s own equipment and the associated teething problems,
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Following from its close collaboration with the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the North West University, to design manufacture and commissioning of complete extrusion lines with all the necessary down-stream equipment based on Agriligna’s in-house expertise.
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In certain specific applications, Agriligna may consider entering into an exclusive minority equity basis with clients using the Agriligna compounds.
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