Paul Lloyd moves Farrel Pomini toward the future

Lloyd: I was involved in sales earlier on, and most of our customers are global. I first came to the U.S. around 2002-2003. I enjoyed that time. Then, I came over in 2007. I was commuting backwards and forwards to the U.S. three weeks out of the month, while I was working in supply chain and logistics. And then, finally, in 2012, we separated the business into business units, and Farrel became a business unit. In December 2012, I got the opportunity to lead the unit. (The continuous mixer and batch mixer portions of the business separated, with Farrel Pomini becoming the business unit for continuous mixers.) Eventually, I moved across to the U.S. in 2016. I've been here ever since. 

What were your experiences with the business like, when you were commuting between the U.S. and U.K.? 

Lloyd: 2007 was a difficult time. I came here to do some work, and then there was a financial crisis, and all of the businesses kind of shut down, and we were midway through a restructure. I came on a nine-month contract, and I stayed for about five years [before eventually being named president]. 

How is business now?  

Lloyd: We’ve come off a very good period for us, as good as I’ve known, with the exception of a blip [during} COVID, which kind of offset business. We’ve been on a growth cycle for a long time with very high levels of business for the last three or four years, and now we have a challenge. 

For us, as mentioned earlier, the thing that attracted me to this business is we make large equipment, which costs a lot of money, several million dollars, and the problem isn’t one specific issue. ... The biggest problem right now is uncertainty. If you’re not certain what will happen next, you take capital projects and significant expenses and give them a look, and most people tend to delay. When people delay, that’s the most difficult thing for us, and that’s what we’re seeing at the moment. We’ve seen it in the last quarter or so, certainly, since the announcements on the tariffs and the ensuing things that followed. 

To what do you attribute how good business was previously? 

Lloyd: The plastics compounding market was on something of an expansion. I think primarily it was a lot of the work that we’d done inside of Farrel, with the continuous mixer, a lot of the innovation. A lot of our innovation had been moving the machinery into new applications. We would make that assessment of saying our business was growing above the market because we were doing quite a nice job of opening up new applications and developing the niches where we operate; in particular, things like biopolymers and recycling, which have been good but, basically, we were doing a good job of focusing the machine in new applications. 

What have been your company’s most significant innovations? 

Lloyd: We launched the CP4000, which is good for around 10,000 pounds an hour of masterbatch production. But it comes in a compact format, which makes it much easier to install. We developed that machine from scratch, so it was easier for our customers to work with, and it’s been very successful. It’s now the largest-selling unit that we make. I’m amazed when we develop the ability to see and optimize machines running all over the world. We have a system where we can connect to our machines wherever they are, which helps us deliver service to our customers and reduces the cost of service technicians.  

Digitalization is something we focus on, and it’s a significant area for us. We have augmented reality (AR) projects that we work on, predominantly customer-facing. In 2018, we developed an augmented-reality CP machine, so people could get inside of our machine and see the installations on site. We’re currently reworking that now to be ready for the K Show, so it will be our augmented-reality 2.0, which is going to give our customers an even better opportunity to get into that equipment.  

The machine is unique. It’s not a twin-screw extruder; it works differently. We’ve done a really nice job with our process engineering team of identifying where the machine has strengths, working in those areas to develop the market. That coincided with some significant changes in the plastics industry, with the requirement for more-sustainable products, moving away from carbon-based products into biopolymers and recycling. We were very proactive in terms of our innovations in those areas, with regard to the way that the machine processes. 

What makes your company’s technologies unique?  

Lloyd: We have a continuous mixer which does the work of the compounding, and it’s normally used with a single-screw extruder, which we use for pressurization. The key thing for us is it’s two separate processes, so we have a mixer which is optimized for mixing and an extruder which is optimized for pressurization. Because of that, we’re able to utilize the mixing section differently, which makes it very flexible, and as a result, we have a very efficient mixing system. So, where you may see a twin-screw extruder with an L:D ratio of 48 (to 1) or even these days, 64, 68 [to 1] L-over-D, our mixing ratios are either 6-to-1 L-over-D or 10-to-1 L-over-D. The machines are not intermeshing, so we have a large free volume. Material moves around in the chamber a lot more ... which makes it a very efficient mixing system. If material is temperature-sensitive, or if the material is difficult to feed, or if it’s very highly filled, it works very well on our machine.  

What makes the technology especially appropriate for the circular economy? 

Lloyd: We’re seeing the same with materials which are coming into the arena now — biopolymers. We also see the same with recycled materials. They’re not quite as easy to work with as materials people were working with 10, 15, 20 years ago, because the target is slightly different, and because of that, increased processing capability is helpful. But the biggest benefit is almost all these materials are temperature-sensitive, and our machine deals very well with temperature-sensitive materials. The materials coming into the market, the PLA, PHA, which react under temperature, run very well on our machine. If you look at mechanical recycling or processing recycled materials, which already have a previous heat history, this is better if it’s processed under lower temperature with a reduced heat history on the second time of processing.  

The [challenge] where we feel we’ve got the most area to help with is with our customers looking at their product portfolios and trying to make them a little more sustainable or work on how they get new materials into that supply chain. That’s a key area for us, both in terms of the development work we’ve done, and also we have development laboratories in the U.K. and in the U.S., where customers can bring in those new materials and run them in our lab, rather than on their production equipment. It allows them to optimize those materials. 

Is that offsetting softness in your business elsewhere?  

Lloyd: We are currently working on that right now, because it gives us an opportunity to expand the size of our business. In tough times, it’s good to have some other opportunities, and for us, there are many. We’ve developed the machine to go quite far out of its traditional market. Not just running different base resins, not just running recycled materials, we’re now using the machine extensively for chemical recycling. We’ve done a lot of work on chemical recycling using the machine as a preprocessor for plastics and for rubber, end-of-life tires.  

Tell me how your machine can be used with chemical recycling processes.  

Lloyd: The machine is very good, in particular, for the tire sector, but it’s the same in plastics, as well. The machine is very good at accepting ground material, which is larger than some other processes, so the material needs to go through heat. It’s actually the opposite of what the machine’s good at in the other area. [Chemical recyclers are] trying to put heat into that material from an external source, which is not so efficient. We’re using the machine to impart mechanical shear to increase the temperature of the material as a preprocessor, so it enables you to get rough-form material homogenized up to a controlled temperature to optimize the pyrolysis of chemical recycling in the second stage. It makes for a very efficient chemical recycling process. On plastics, we tend to work with some of the major people developing pyrolysis systems. 

What sort of plastics can be treated in that process? 

Lloyd: Most of the work we’ve done is with the company Lummus. They say their chemical recycling can recycle around 55 to 60 percent of the plastics that are out there. You have to be careful in certain areas, but polyolefins and things like that [are] very easy. You have to be a little careful with PVC. 

How much of your business do you think is split between recyclers and processors? 

Lloyd: One of our strategic goals is to increase the amount of business we do in more-sustainable areas like recycling, biopolymers and such. At this moment, it’s still dominated by traditional processes; biopolymers [are] making up as a more significant number, but it’s from a very small base. If you consider the amount of biopolymers produced rather than polyolefins, the growth rates on the biopolymers side will make your eyes water. The volume’s a little bit lower, but at this moment, we would probably see around 15 percent as a sustainable segment. Our plan, together with the end-of-life tire business, is to see that by 2030 that’s more than 50 percent of our business.  

Is that an achievable goal? 

Lloyd: Yes. We know the machine already works well in those areas. We need processes to work with to achieve those goals; our process technicians are learning this [and] these materials. We do need momentum inside the overall market to keep pushing people in that direction. Internally for us, it’s an achievable goal. The market exists that we could quite easily do that. Right now, there’s some challenges for the recycling businesses in Europe and the U.S. The path forward, in the short term, is not so clear; it’s quite difficult. I think a business model which consumes raw materials and produces waste isn’t a viable solution; moving forward, you need a business model which can be [an] efficient use of new resources and not produce any waste. That would suggest that the sustainable platforms we’re working on would be an ideal model for the future. The bit between A and B is the difficult bit to predict. 

I think the challenges that have faced plastics for several years, if handled correctly, could turn into an opportunity to enable all this, then allow plastic materials to be used more readily. Right now, there’s tremendous external pressure to take plastics out of supply chains, to reduce the amount of plastics based on the fact we have an issue with waste. If you ban something, innovation stops; whereas if you allow people to innovate — something the plastics industry has been incredibly good at for the last 60 to 70 years — I think you would find a way of developing materials which give excellent solutions, utilizing good products at economic prices without creating a waste problem or a resource problem. I think that’s a very achievable thing to do. 

What other innovations do you see in the pipeline? 

Lloyd: The K Show is a really good opportunity for us to gauge things. The last K show was dominated by recycling applications. We’ll be very interested to see how that technology has progressed and how we've progressed with it. The other element for us is the digitalization of our businesses and our customer businesses. We’re also very keen to have discussions with our customers about the use of artificial intelligence (AI). 

Do you see a future for AR and AI for training workers? 

Lloyd: We started using AR back in 2018, and we predominantly saw it as being a maintenance and training tool. The sales tool was the easiest, low-hanging fruit, but it really creates the least value. I think with the current difficulties employing skilled people, using AR to supplement our service skills and the maintenance skills of our customers, is 100 percent a real-life opportunity for the technology. I think it would be very good to even out the differences between a good operator and a bad operator in terms of optimization, and artificial intelligence has the potential to do that for us. I think it would be very good to see it applied to processing problems and real-life situations. 

Has Farrel had a problem finding workers, as processors have reported they’ve experienced? 

Lloyd: If I speak to the leaders of the companies that we sell to, finding the right people to work on the line is difficult for them. Finding people to work in those areas is difficult for them. It’s the same [for us]. A lot of the equipment that we manufacture goes overseas, but, normally, when that equipment goes overseas, you need a human being to follow that equipment to make sure it’s installed properly and people are trained properly. Now, people are not so willing to be away. They’re not so willing to travel. We need methods of optimizing the service that a customer gets while minimizing the human impact required to deliver it. AI gives us an opportunity for that. 

Anything that we can do to assist with training or the optimization of the line, digitalization of the line is helpful. 

What advice would you give to younger workers?  

Lloyd: I think you have to find something you really enjoy. Whatever it is, wherever you find that, if you don’t have it right now, keep looking. Once you find something that interests you, it’s easier to learn. You should always be learning. As long as you’re learning, you have a real opportunity to grow your career. Everybody focuses on career growth, but to me, it starts with enjoyment. It moves through learning, understanding the processes and things that go around you, and then you’ll find your way. I wouldn’t get too hung up on what it is. I would just make sure you’re enjoying it and it’s embellishing the things you want to learn. 

Do you feel that way about the plastics industry? 

Lloyd: Yes. I still learn every day. I still find out I’m wrong very often, which is good for me. It’s nice inside our business, a very wide range of customers face different issues. We have machines which are difficult to build, which gives us a constant sense of challenge. It’s very rare that I go through a week or even a day where something doesn’t go in front of me that’s not an opportunity to see something I haven’t seen before, so it’s still good.  

What do you like to do outside of work? 

Lloyd: I like to travel. I am from the U.K. It’s a small island, and there isn’t that much [there]. There’s no good weather, either.  

I think everybody should go to Asia at least once in their lifetime. I’ve traveled in Brazil, which is a nice country, although predominantly I’ve done that for work. Africa is also quite nice. 

When at home, I like spending time with family. I would maybe do some reading, or I get out on my bike and get outside, or for a walk with my wife. 

What would you like to be your legacy?  

Lloyd: Farrel’s a 177-year-old company, so there’s a lot of people who’ve got a lot of legacy, but I think it would be very nice for me as the leader of Farrel Pomini right now, to leave this business where more than 50 percent of its business comes from sustainable-based operations, and to make sure that we have an engineering team that’s capable of innovating to whatever the problems of that day are.