Zbigniew Pawłucki has been appointed deputy chairman of the board at Izoblok (Chorzów / Poland; www.izoblok.pl). He will be responsible for coordinating sales at the group, as well as customer relations and the group's R&D, especially regarding material production technology and automation development. Pawłucki began his carrier at Ford, and from 1995 to 2004 he was employed at HP Chemie Pelzer, where he was responsible, among other things, for developing a production plant in Poland. Since 2007, he has worked at PKN Orlen (Plock / Poland; www.orlen.pl) as executive director for real estate investments.

Izoblok is the parent company of the Izoblok Capital Group, which was established after acquiring 100% shares of the German company SSW PearlFoam – see Plasteurope.com of 09.09.2016. The group's companies specialise in processing expanded plastics, especially expanded polypropylene (EPP). According to Izoblok, the group holds approximately 25% of shares of the European EPP market. Isoblok's 2016/2017 annual operating revenue was PLN 94.5m (EUR 22.8m).

The company produces over 28m EPP components annually in 4 plants (3 in Poland and 1 in Germany), mainly for the automotive and logistics industries. Izoblok supplies automotive OEM and tier 1 groups, such as Yanfeng Automotive Interiors (Shanghai / China; www.yfai.com), Faurecia (Nanterre / France; www.faurecia.com), Lear (Southfield, Michigan / USA; www.lear.com) and Adler Pelzer (formerly HP Pelzer, Witten / Germany; www.adlerpelzer.com). In December 2017, automotive seats supplier Adient's (Plymouth, Michigan / USA; www.adient.com) Germany-based subsidiary, in Burscheid, placed orders estimated at EUR 10.5m for projects requiring batch manufacturing of EPP car parts.