"The plastics processors are angry," said Alexandre Dangis, managing director of the European Plastics Converters Association (EuPC, Brussels / Belgium; www.plasticsconverters.eu), speaking on 1 June 2012 at the "EuPC Annual Meeting" in Vienna / Austria about the mounting raw material cost increases and the associated large number of "forces majeures" (FMs) in Europe. Dangis believes that this trend will slow down the industry's recovery, just at a point when growth is appearing in the market. EuPC is considering appropriate actions to limit the effects of FMs and related issues.

EuPC sees FMs been invoked by suppliers with increasing frequency in the last serveral years. "They are a real issue seriously undermining their reliability in the eyes of customers," said Dangis. He pleads to start setting up a standard for "Excellence in Polymer Supply in Europe" with the absence of "forces majeures" as its key criterion. A "European Code of Conduct" could provide some objective rationale against which the validity of FM declarations could be assessed, said Dangis. This would help "to maintain a competitive plastics industry and to avoid more translocation of converting plants to outside of the EU." In order to further monitor the development of this issue, EuPC announced working with its national plastics associations to survey the problems at the converter level and analyse the results after summer.

One of the main issues in regards to raw material purchasing of converters, which is addressed by Plasteurope.com's recently launched capacity database Polyglobe (www.polyglobe.net), is the transparency of the supply situation. With Polyglobe, all plastics players are kept reliably and quickly informed of both the present and medium-to-long-term capacity situation at all times. This unique online database contains global information on all production plants and sites worldwide (current as well as projected capacities, status updates) and companies worldwide (with consolidated data on joint ventures and corporate groups as well as portfolio overviews) for all kinds of polymers and the main petrochemical feedstocks.

Polyglobe users are kept informed about regional availabilities with limitation issues like forces majeures, maintenance, reductions and outages. Thus Polyglobe offers optimum market transparency, updating cases of forces majeures and availability in real time, and provides comprehensive statistics and forecasts. One can select and present all the information quickly and easily with precisely the amount of detail needed. In addition, further background information to many of the statistics is readily available.