Midas Pattern Company Ltd was founded in 1989 as a foundry patternmaking business, making precision foundry tooling for the local foundry industry. The company cut out a niche for itself by developing a new production process, a ‘plastic foundry’, casting polyurethane resin into composite resin moulds. From that foundation, Midas Pattern Co. Ltd has built itself into a leading business over more than 30 years, producing the largest, most complex, highly finished mouldings for the medical device sector.
“We have grown from two people to a staff of 110 with an £8 million turnover and have become the world leaders in what we do,” Alan Rance, Managing Director of Midas Pattern.
Midas Pattern Co. Ltd has been able to do this because of its unique, proprietary tooling process, Midas MRIM. Midas MRIM is a composite resin tooling system that gives the company a significant advantage in the marketplace when it comes to large, complex, PU moulding.
“We can handle low-volume prototyping and high-volume parts. We can produce all the quality of any other process from volumes of one to 2,000 a year,” Rance explains. “The unique point is the cost, a tenth of the cost of metal tooling.”
That cost advantage comes into its own when applied to the most difficult moulding jobs.
“One of the things I’ve learned after 34 years in business is anyone can make the easy stuff, but very few can make the difficult stuff,” Rance reflects. “That is why we only make the most difficult parts. Multipart enclosures, undercuts, features that don’t mould, these are all straightforward to us.”
Midas Pattern Co. Ltd is capable of creating the largest mouldings from this material, at three metres by two metres by one metre, available anywhere in the world. These mouldings are finished with multiple paint finishings, and Midas is happy to apply a metal coating to reduce radio frequency interference and electromagnetic emissions if required.
“We are ideally suited for multipart enclosures, and have worked on several examples with more than 25 large mouldings coming together to make an instrument enclosure,” Rance says. “We have recently manufactured the polyurethane castings for a very large proton beam scanner.”
A Company with a Cause
This could easily have been an article about a company using an innovative technique to manufacture difficult and complex products at a low cost. It would be an interesting article- but one fateful day changed the course of the company forever.
“On April 18, 2018, I watched Climate Change: The Facts with David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg,” Rance recalls. “I had always felt that I was a pretty green person, but after watching that I just felt ashamed of myself. It was an epiphany moment- I couldn’t believe how environmentally ignorant I had been.”
Determined to change, over the next couple of years, Rance changed everything.
“I became vegetarian, I put my car on the market and ordered an electric car, changed my electricity supplier, and bought 100% biogas. I did all the work on my house to make it energy-friendly and stopped flying,” Rance tells us. “I reduced my carbon footprint however I could, I moved my personal footprint from 15 tonnes p.a. down to less than 2!”
Naturally, that did not stop with the business Rance ran, and so the Midas Green Initiative was born.
“That is the name we have given to our journey from what we used to call normality to the new normal of Carbon net zero,” Rance says. “The task at Midas was huge – we’re a PU moulder using earth chemistry to make our products.”
Nonetheless, Midas Pattern Co. Ltd changed its electricity provider, bought biogas, and began measuring its carbon footprint. By June 2020 the company had installed its own solar farm across its 20,000 and 10,000-square-foot factories. This was more than just a PR exercise to boost the company’s bottom line- in fact, Rance was more than willing to sacrifice the company’s bottom line to achieve his goals.
“We pushed as fast as we could,” he says. “I took the view that we had run a successful business for 30-odd years, but I wanted to invest whatever it took to become carbon neutral. My priority was making amends for our carbon-intensive past, and wherever the business was after all that investment we would start again as an ethical green business.”
Unexpected Benefits
However, there was one thing that Rance had not taken into account at the outset. His investments in making the business sustainable would have an unforeseen effect.
“What I didn’t appreciate is that every step we made actually saved us money. The business went from strength to strength from day one,” Rance says. “We had both of our roofs covered in solar panels, and when we switched that on it created power for the business but also gave us electricity to export.”
The carbon credits Midas Pattern Co. Ltd gained from that took the company to carbon neutrality, and within PAS 2060 it ticked off Scopes 1 & 2, accredited by the Carbon Trust. To do this, and to do it honestly, without any greenwash, was a massive achievement, but Rance did not stop there.
“It’s one thing having a factory that’s carbon neutral, but every item we sell also has carbon embedded in it, and most of our customers aren’t as passionate as we are,” Rance said. “So we had to take responsibility for the carbon in our products.”
To do this, Midas Pattern Co. Ltd forged a partnership with its local community forest, The Forest of Marston Vale, three miles down the road. Midas Pattern Co. Ltd bought pending issuance units in order to mitigate the carbon content in all the products it sells. As a result of this, the company is now ‘Carbon Net Zero to PAS 2060 Scope 1,2 & 3’. Accredited by NQA.
“We can identify the trees which our carbon is allocated to in the forest down the road, making it legitimate, tangible and auditable,” Rance insists. “Every product we sell, the carbon within that is fully mitigated. We buy extra beyond that, and in addition to that we are contractually bound to plant a minimum of 500 trees a year.”
But even with that mitigation, Rance feels that the products Midas Pattern Co. Ltd makes need to be justified by a greater good.
“We feel we can justify using earth chemistry because every product we make adheres to our rule of being either life-enhancing or life-saving,” says Rance. “If it doesn’t, we decline the opportunity to get involved or even quote. That ethical view and green credentials help make us a world-leading business. We are setting an example, investing responsibly, and setting ourselves up for a fantastic future within the industry we dominate.”
Dominate is the word. Midas Pattern Co. Ltd has seen its order book quadruple over the last two years, leading the firm to put two shifts in place during the working day. It is now shipping twice as many products as it was six months ago.
“We enjoy a very dominant position in the marketplace,” Rance says. “We spend most of our time now sharing our green knowledge with other companies, suppliers, customers and even competitors. It’s not about a business advantage, we simply want to do everything in our power to make everyone able to achieve what we have achieved.”
