Why food and beverage manufacturers are replacing metal wear parts with TIVAR® UHMW-PE — and how Emco fabricates it into ready-to-install components.
Every hour a food processing line runs, its wear surfaces are fighting friction, moisture, and the clock. Guide rails score. Scrapers dull. Stainless chutes corrode at the weld seams. TIVAR® UHMW-PE was built to take that fight off metal's plate.
Emco Industrial Plastics fabricates TIVAR® UHMW-PE into the wear parts that keep processing lines moving — guide rails, scraper blades, chute liners, sprockets, and star wheels — cut, machined, and finished to the equipment drawings our food and beverage customers already run on.
Stainless steel is the default in food processing for a reason — it's strong and it's cleanable. But it isn't frictionless, and it isn't immune to wear. Metal-on-metal and metal-on-product contact points generate noise, gall over time, and often need constant lubrication that itself becomes a contamination risk in a food-contact environment. Corrosion at welds and fasteners creates crevices where bacteria can take hold, and repeated washdown cycles accelerate all of it.
TIVAR® UHMW-PE food-grade sheet and rod is manufactured to meet FDA, USDA, and 3-A Dairy Sanitation guidelines for food processing and handling, and specific grades add EU 10/2011 compliance for global lines. That compliance is the entry ticket — the performance is what keeps it installed. TIVAR® grades are engineered for superior wear resistance, zero moisture absorption, and reliable welding and machining characteristics, which is exactly what a washdown-heavy environment demands: no water uptake to harbor bacteria, and a surface that keeps performing after thousands of cleaning cycles.
The friction advantage is measurable. TIVAR® HPV, a grade purpose-built for conveyor wear strips, delivers an 80% reduction in coefficient of friction compared to POM-C and offers 18–35% higher limiting pressure velocity values than competing dry-lubricant materials — meaning less drive load, less belt wear, and a quieter line, without adding external lubricant to a food-contact zone.
The comparison isn't about replacing all metal in a plant — frames and structural components stay stainless. It's about the high-friction, high-wear contact points where a self-lubricating polymer outperforms bare metal, and where zero moisture absorption matters more than raw hardness.
TIVAR® isn't one material — it's a family of food-grade UHMW-PE compounds, each tuned for a different failure mode on the line:
| Grade | Best for | Why it's specified |
|---|---|---|
| TIVAR® 1000 FG | Bearings, bushings, sprockets, guides | Well-balanced wear and corrosion resistance with a low-friction surface and excellent impact strength |
| TIVAR® DS FG | High-wear replacement parts | Superior wear and abrasion resistance over standard TIVAR® 1000, same FDA/EU compliance |
| TIVAR® H.O.T. FG | Washdown-heavy dairy, bakery, poultry lines | Holds performance at operating temperatures up to 135°C (275°F) where frequent hot washdowns shorten standard part life |
| TIVAR® HPV FG | High-speed conveyor wear strips | 80% lower coefficient of friction than POM-C with a built-in dry lubricant for noise reduction |
| TIVAR® VMX FG | Parts near metal detection / X-ray | Visual, X-ray, and metal-detectable formulation so a broken fragment is caught before it reaches product |
If a line is running hot, loud, or through more wear parts than it should, the fix is usually smaller than a capital project — it's the right polymer in the right spot. Emco's team can review your current wear-part drawings and recommend the TIVAR® grade that matches your washdown chemistry, temperature, and detection requirements.
Send us your wear-part prints or a sample of the part that's failing — we'll recommend a TIVAR® grade and turn it into a finished component.
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