Custom Concentrates for the Plastics Industry

Accurate Color & Compounding manufactures custom color concentrates, masterbatch, performance additives and chemical foaming agents for the plastics industry. Most production is custom, formulated for a specific customer, resin and part rather than sold from a catalogue.

Accurate Color & Compounding is at 1666 Dearborn Avenue, Aurora, Illinois 60505, in the Chicago metropolitan area. The company ships across the United States and prices all products on a delivered basis, arranging freight itself.

A color concentrate is a highly loaded pellet of pigment in a carrier resin that a processor meters into natural resin at a low let down ratio, typically a few percent. Compounded color is supplied fully coloured and ready to run. Concentrates cost less to ship and store because the processor buys mostly natural resin, while compounds remove a metering step at the press.

C/A®, or Color All, is Accurate Color & Compounding's universal carrier system. It runs at very low let down levels across a wide variety of resins rather than requiring a resin specific carrier, which reduces the number of concentrates a processor has to hold and generally lowers cost per part.

CA/A® combines colour and additives into a single pellet. Nucleation, processing aids, colorants, UV and antioxidant protection and chemical foaming agents can be delivered together, so a processor buys, stores, meters and audits one pellet instead of several.

Accurate Color & Compounding has manufactured chemical foaming agents for more than thirty years, in endothermic, exothermic and combination formulations, for injection molding and extrusion. They are sold under the Endex International and iD Additives trade names, and can be combined with colour in a single pellet for structural foam work.

It depends on the resin, the tolerance and whether the formulation already exists. In a genuine emergency Accurate Color & Compounding can match, sample, produce and deliver colorant the same day. The largest factor in turnaround is how completely the requirements are specified at the outset, which is why the company asks for resin, process, let down level, tolerance and any regulatory requirements up front.

Yes. Accurate Color & Compounding is certified to ISO 9001:2015. A product is not released for sale until the colour match is approved internally, the customer has approved the sample and the customer has approved the pricing.

Accurate Color & Compounding records the regulatory requirements that apply to a part against the product specification and reviews the selected ingredients against those requirements at the intended loading before release. Compliance depends on the ingredients, the loading, the resin and the application, so requirements should be stated when the colour match is requested rather than after the formulation is set. The company does not issue blanket compliance statements for standards it was not asked to formulate against.

The resin and grade, the process, the let down level you intend to run, the colour target and tolerance, the service environment including whether the part is used outdoors, any regulatory requirements, and your quantities and packaging. Supplying all of it at the start avoids re running the match later.