Manufacturing, Materials and the Environment
You may wonder what are our floats made of?
Our floats are made of EPS or what is now known in NZ as Airpop.
Our floats are:
- High density - resistant to damage or breaking, water and weather resistant (think of your bicycle helmet inner)
- 95% Air minimum! The custom manufacturing process means they are mainly air, the base product is expanded twice in our process to ensure minimal material usage with maximum longevity of the finished product by achieving the High Density finish - with no harmful chemicals used
- Designed for longevity - their shapes are resistant to damage, being pulled on and off a boat and they have centre holes for ropes and lines meaning they will not break free leaving both the float and lost fishing gear in the ocean
Our Manufacturing Process
Our floats are made in a custom manufacturing process, developed and refined over 35 years. It is labour intensive with high pressure injected air, using steam and cooling to make the High Density product they are. This ensures:
- Long life expectancy
- Highly resistant to damage or breaking into small pieces - think of your bicycle helmet
- High standard quality
- Minimal waste
- our factory produces less than one wheelie bin of waste per year.
- our raw materials are delivered in containers which are reused - some of the drums have been in careful circulation over 20 years
Our floats are not:
- Individual beads - like a bean bag
- Soft and crumbly - like some disposable packaging that breaks into many small individual pieces and spreads everywhere through the environment
- Polystyrene - that is a very broad older generic term that doesn't differentiate between responsible use and manufacturing versus other techniques or uses