VEGETABLE CRATE (PLASTIC)

India’s diverse climate ensures availability of all varieties of fresh fruits & vegetables. It ranks second in fruits and vegetables production in the world, after China. As per National Horticulture Database published by National Horticulture Board, during 2015-16, India produced 90.2 million metric tonnes of fruits and 169.1 million metric tonnes of vegetables. The area under cultivation of fruits stood at 6.3 million hectares while vegetables were cultivated at 10.1 million hectares.

India is the largest producer of ginger and okra amongst vegetables and ranks second in production of potatoes, onions, cauliflowers, brinjal, Cabbages, etc. Amongst fruits, the country ranks first in production of Bananas (25.7%), Papayas (43.6%) and Mangoes (including mangosteens and guavas) (40.4%).

The vast production base offers India tremendous opportunities for export. During 2019-20, India exported fruits and vegetables worth Rs. 9,182.88 crores/ 1,277.38 USD Millions which comprised of fruits worth Rs. 4,832.81 crores/ 668.75 USD Millions and vegetables worth Rs. 4,350.13 crores/ 608.48 USD Millions.

Grapes, Pomegranates, Mangoes, Bananas, Oranges account for larger portion of fruits exported from the country while Onions, Mixed Vegetables, Potatoes, Tomatoes, and Green Chilly contribute largely to the vegetable export basket.

The major destinations for Indian fruits and vegetables are Bangladesh, UAE, Netherland, Nepal, Malaysia, UK, Sri Lanka, Oman and Qatar.

Though India’s share in the global market is still nearly 1% only, there is increasing acceptance of horticulture produce from the country. This has occurred due to concurrent developments in the areas of state-of-the-art cold chain infrastructure and quality assurance measures. Apart from large investment pumped in by the private sector, public sector has also taken initiatives and with APEDA’s assistance several Centers for Perishable Cargoes and integrated post harvest handling facilities have been set up in the country. Capacity building initiatives at the farmers, processors and exporters’ levels has also contributed towards this effort.

Injection moulding is one of the most important processes used in plastic goods manufacture both in terms of volume of thermoplastics handled and the range of products manufactured. The original injection moulding machines were similar in design to metal die casting machine, when this process was developed in 1934 for the rapid molding of thermoplastics. During the subsequent years, especially as experience and increase in understanding of processing characteristics of plastics led to the improvements in the design of such machines, this technique has proved highly successful and today the great bulk of thermoplastics are manufactured by this technique. The injection moulding machine is now a sophisticated integrated piece of equipment and includes all the mechanisms and controls required to carry out successful each step of the injection molding process completely in a single unit. During the past two decades the demand has grown for larger and larger capacity machines and today it is possible to inject as much a 5 kgs of material at one shot injection molding process has inherent advantages of high degree of repetitive accuracy and adaptability for the production of a wide range of components. The process of injection moudling can be applied with Modification in that the plasticizing chamber contains enough material to fill the mold several times.