With so many new information technologies, regulations and innovative applications, plastics converters are nowadays confronted with numerous challenges. At the "KI Group Summit" during the "Fakuma" 2017 trade fair, a number of industry experts discussed the latest trends and topics, ranging from Industry 4.0 and REACH to e-mobility and autonomous driving.

In plastics processing, there are still numerous opportunities available in the Industry 4.0 field, said Christian Hopmann, head of the Institute of Plastics Processing (IKV, Aachen / Germany; www.ikv-aachen.de) at RWTH Aachen University, to the audience of nearly 200. And there were no universally valid industry solutions, he added. Every company has to find its own strategy.

Subsequently, Ton Emans, president at Plastics Recyclers Europe (PRE, Maastricht / The Netherlands; www.plasticsrecyclers.eu) and head of Recycling at CeDo Recycling (Geleen / The Netherlands), spoke in favour of an EU-wide standardisation of collection, sorting and recycling systems for plastics. Above all, Emans emphasised, it must be ensured that products are manufactured so that they are recyclable. "Success of recycling is dependent on the purity of the material," he said, and added that he was in favour of an incentive system, stiffer regulations, taxes or levies as controlling instruments for the industry.

Bernd Sparenberg, head of Technical Compounds at Albis Plastic (Hamburg / Germany; www.albis.com), emphasised the growing importance of material diversity. For compounders, this creates the opportunity to work together with customers to drive product development and thus develop optimised materials for new applications, for example, in lightweight construction.

Werner Balandat, senior vice president Corporate Production at ZF Friedrichshafen (Friedrichshafen / Germany; www.zf.com), explained how the company is focused on low-emission vehicles and safety. The car component supplier’s strategy, called "Vision Zero", involves focusing production on components that help reduce CO₂ emissions in traffic to as near to zero as possible and, at the same time, promoting safety to cut down on the number of accidents.

Axel Tuchlenski, head of Global Product & Application Development at Lanxess (Cologne / Germany; www.lanxess.com), is convinced that PA 6 will in future play a more important role in high-performance uses, and will displace PA 6.6 in many applications. The company, he said, has subjected the material uses – for example, for the production of oil sumps – to long-term testing and established that it has outstanding resistance properties. Traditional applications such as the combustion engine will not collapse from one day to the next, but, in the field of electro mobility, "claims are now being staked for the coming years," he explained.

Lastly, Daniel Stricker, chief editor and head of Market Research at the KI Group (Bad Homburg / Germany; www.kiweb.de), emphasised that the feared shortage on the PP market will not occur. Although the boom with shale gas and oil in the United States had led to major distortions worldwide along the petrochemical value chain, the massive deposits of propane gas allowed the US to export ever larger volumes. In the major PP-using regions of the world, such as China, India and Europe, companies have adjusted to this shift and facilities are already being built there for producing PP from propane gas. Consequently, said Stricker, although PP production had decoupled itself from PE production, a market bottleneck is not to be expected in view of developments in the production process.