Full Service Closed Loop

Precious metal customers can reduce their cost of ownership through Materion’s “Full Service Closed Loop.” Instead of the purchase of metal being your only and final transaction, we provide a program that saves money and offers other advantages.

How it Works – Targets and Evaporation Materials

To understand the “closed loop” approach, it is important to understand that only 25% of the material in a target is actually used during the sputtering process, 75% remains. With a closed loop, that remaining precious metal goes into the customer’s “metal account” and becomes a credit applied to their next order.  This means they do not have the expense of buying a “whole” target each time.

Similarly, for evaporation materials, only about 10% of the precious metal ends up on the customer’s product.  The rest adheres to the chamber walls. This valuable material is recoverable by cleaning the shields and retaining as much metal as possible – a reclamation service offered by Materion.  The  salvage can then be credited to a metal account to reduce the cost of the customer’s next purchase.

More Benefits of Closed Loop

The closed loop process essentially keeps the material in play for its life cycle with the convenience of dealing with one company for all related services. From the point where the customer acquires precious metal products, uses them in their manufacturing processes, returns the remains for a metal account credit, has their shields cleaned for salvageable metal, has their scrap recycled, and is provided a settlement – the precious metal loop is managed for you.

The end result of the “full service closed loop” is lower cost of ownership and the value-added from consolidating all your metal activities.  We offer customers our precious metals management expertise which has earned us a place as industry leader.  For more information on precious metal products and full service closed loop, contact Jim McMullen, Product Manager, James.McMullen@Materion.com