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In the high-stakes world of plastics compounding and recycling, even minor color mismatches can trigger major costs. For one industry leader near Cologne, Germany, a single mistake meant losing 30 tons of off-spec product. The cost? Not just in raw materials, but time, trust, and customer satisfaction.

The Hidden Risk of Color Variability

This customer, already using HunterLab’s ColorFlex EZ and UltraScan PRO systems for lab-based quality control, faced an urgent question: Can pellet color be measured in-line, in real time?

They needed to act before a mistake reached the silo, not after. The cost of reactive color checks, pulling test chips, lab time, and human error was no longer sustainable.

❗Real Pain Point: A single mismatch led to silo contamination, wasting 30 tons of production.

Plastic plaques play a crucial role in evaluating the color and appearance of plastic pellets, serving as a reliable medium to transform raw materials into a tangible, uniform surface for precise analysis. These plaques are pressed under controlled conditions, allowing manufacturers to assess how the pellets' color manifests when formed into a flat, consistent shape. To further enhance their utility, plaques can be produced with varying surface characteristics, such as different gloss levels and textures, to evaluate the visual impact of these properties on color perception. This process ensures that the final product meets both aesthetic and functional requirements, providing a critical quality check in industries where appearance consistency is paramount, such as automotive, consumer goods, and packaging. 

Opacity and Color Measurement

Opacity refers to a material's ability to prevent light from passing through. When measuring color in opaque materials, we focus on reflectance. Reflectance is how light interacts with the plastic's surface and reflects to our eyes. Visual color comparisons are unreliable due to limitations in human color perception and the inability to account for texture variations. Spectrophotometers can standardize conditions to ensure the measurement is consistent and repeatable. 

Color consistency can play a major role in whether a consumer chooses one brand's product over another. That means businesses that work with plastic, either as a product or a packaging material, need to pay close attention to their color formulas and the consistency of their outputs. 

Quality control specialists in every industry have recognized the benefits of using a spectrophotometer to measure product colors, ensuring better consistency and branding — and alignment with sustainability goals.

What Factors Affect Plastic Color?

Your plastic may look right as you process it, but will it look the same when it hits the shelves? Product appearances can differ from store to store and shelf to shelf due to factors like:

• Light: All color is based on the way light reflects off an object. Understanding how color changes under different light sources can help you see why a color measurement tool is crucial in maintaining consistency.
• Opacity: Plastic ranges from being totally opaque to transparent, and variations in opacity can change the way its color is perceived. The same coloration formula can produce different results across multiple pieces of plastic based on the level of transparency each piece holds. 

• Gloss: Plastic can be matte or glossy. The glossier a piece of plastic is, the more likely the finish is to affect the product's appearance. 

Achieving uniformity, repeatability, and consistency is the best way to ease consumer scrutiny. Fortunately, powerful solutions exist to help you capture, quantify, and track color accurately to maintain your high quality standards.

The color of a transparent film plays an essential role in its appearance and, in most cases, its functionality. Color measurement can ensure accurate and consistent transparency of plastic film. Let's explore some of the best practices for measuring the color of transparent film.

The Importance of Color Measurement for Transparent Plastic Film 

Transparent plastic film has many applications, from packaging food and beverages to protecting cell phone screens. In these applications, the plastic film's appearance directly impacts the product's quality and how customers perceive it. 

For instance, a customer would choose a clear screen protector instead of a cloudy one because cloudiness affects visibility. Because of this, achieving a consistent level of transparency and clarity with every batch is crucial. Measuring the color of plastic film allows you to monitor variables such as visibility, clarity, and haze where transparency is concerned.

Understanding the chemical composition of plastics is important for safety and reusability. Image Source: Flickr user Bradley Gordon

Plastic is something that most of us use every day, but we rarely stop to think about where these materials come from. The chemical composition of plastic plays an important role in product safety and recyclability, yet most of us take that for granted. Understanding the chemical composition of plastics can make a difference in post-consumer reusability, recycling, and product safety. With advancements in spectrophotometric technology and more portable instrumentation options, we now have the ability to accurately identify the chemical composition in plastics and differentiate specific materials to filter out hazardous materials.

A company producing opaque plastic enclosures relies on color consistency across batches to reflect its brand. If this applies to you, here are five of the most important things to know about opaque color measuring.

1. Opaque Plastic Enclosures Can Be Glossy or Hazy

Depending on a company's preference, their plastic enclosures can have a glossy, semi-gloss, or matte finish. This finish can affect the color measurement and product appearance under several conditions, especially in different lighting. Glossy finishes can range from high to low, and you must be aware of which type you are measuring to maintain consistency. 

2. Opaque Colors Require Geometry

Solid opaque colors have a specific measurement geometry. Opaque plastic is measured by two standards of geometry measurement to ensure product consistency:

• 45/0-degree and 0/45-degree directional, annular and circumferential
• Diffuse d/8

Polymer additives have improved the use of plastics in manufacturing and created new innovations solutions with the use of these materials. Image Source: Flickr user Kevin Dooley (CC BY 2.0)

After a recent trip to the store, which yielded plastic bags filled with plastic packages—containing plastic toys, lights, and dinnerware—I’ve become fairly convinced that plastics are taking over the world. Polymer is the material of the future.

The Packaging Science University of Florida explains the reason for this market trend best, stating that “improvements in polymer performance have opened the door for new and innovative ways of production. Numerous additives provide processing and manufacturing performance improvements; others allow materials to have an assortment of enhanced properties”1. Polymer additives are expanding the use of plastics in manufacturing and are the key ingredient in innovative design.

But the color analysis of plastic and polymer additives also plays a significant role the development of new products. With advancements in spectrophotometric technology, we have seen a huge improvement in the use and functionality of polymer additives across the industry.