Commodity chain - Essay Example

Commodity Chain I constantly use a mug at least three times a day while taking coffee as my favorite drink. The mug was manufactured in Taiwan by Wei Mon industry co., Ltd (Media Federal, 2011) and is found in plastic and ceramic form, my favorite is the plastic form that I constantly use. The mug is made of only plastic with decorations engraved all around to make it more presentable and attractive. The use of plastic as raw materials could have been settled at due to the widely available forms of plastics in the market today. The raw materials could have been sourced from mainland Taiwan having polyethylene related industries from which the mug was made. The high density polythene is constantly recycled, where other products that have lived their usefulness are broken and the materials remolded to make new items.
The mug as it involves simple manufacturing process of melting plastics and then remolding the plastic to form the mug. This must have been made in the same place where the material was outsourced. This is further affirmed by Media Federal (2011) who explains that the company manufacturers large volumes of similar product. It therefore means that the smelting and the molding were made at the same factory; that is the Wei Mon industry co., Ltd. The plastic that is the main raw material in the mug was most likely sourced within the country for recycling or was either new plastic that was formed in the company to manufacture mugs. Considering that the factory manufactures many similar products as Media Federal (2011) explains, the plastic was most likely new and had been formed from raw materials. Plastics are made of polymers through a polymerization process. Most ingredients for polymerization are mostly imported from several countries China and the U.S being leaders in making these polymer materials (Harper, 714). The ingredients to make the mug were most likely bought from China and the company carried out the polymerization process to obtain the polymers that were later used in manufacturing the mugs.
` The product is produced through injection molding. The molds were most likely designed in the Wei Mon Industry co. and then used to carry out injection molding as the main process that the company is involved in. The product therefore involved the use of already designed moulds where molten plastic was forced through, and the mug formed from the molds. The workers in the process must have made very low wages. The mug requires the use of molds that are in most cases automated, the human input is reduced to control of systems only. The mugs are made at thousands per hour, meaning that the wages per each hundred mugs was negligible. The simple process of designing the mold and carrying out extrusion molding compared to the number of molds produced and the cost of one mug could not have been of any considerable amount. This makes the company to make many different types of mugs and many other ranges of products. The product must have gone through various steps to reach here. The product was taken to the company stores after manufacturing, where it was either sold to suppliers or directly loaded into containers and exported through water transportation to specific suppliers in the country. From the wholesalers, the stores bought the product and it was at the store where I managed to purchase the particular mug.
Word count 568 words
Work cited
Harper A. Charles. Handbook of plastics, elastomers, and composites.CA: McGraw Hill, 2002.
Media Federal. Wei Mon Industry Co., Ltd. Asian Products. 2011. http://www.asianproducts.com/product/A12355446232216866_P13130783954983861/injection-products.html 16 Nov. 2011. Read More