Plastics News Europe - November/December 2019 - 25

K2019 REVIEW

Memorable sights

Ulrich Reifenhäuser,
Chairman of the
Exhibitor Advisory
Board at K 2019:
"Global demand for
innovative machinery
and raw materials
is particularly high
right now"

ers attending from the industry had
come to Düsseldorf to invest, for the
most part in equipment and machines and mainly for expansion purposes, with two-thirds of all respondents mentioning this area first.
Multiple choices were possible. 52%
said they were primarily interested in
raw materials and auxiliaries; for
28% of visitors, semi-finished products and technical plastics and rubber parts were the major reason for
coming. Extruders and extrusion
lines, injection moulding machines
as well as recovery and recycling machinery and equipment were the primary targets. Interestingly, that survey also revealed that the interest in
recycling systems was noticeably
higher abroad than in Germany.

'Green' coloured every aspect of the
news from K, with circular and sustainable operating as the buzz words
throughout the eight days of the K
fair. Some of the manifestations were
more arresting than others; indeed,
one of the more bizarre sights was
Miss K 2019 - a life-size blow-moulded stoic-faced doll that was being
given away at the stand of blow
moulding machinery producer BBM
Maschinenbau und Vertriebs GmbH.
The 'green' aspect? Use of a coextruded parison that has an inner layer
of recycled polyethylene supplied by
RSH Polymere GmbH of Hamburg,
Germany. "The circular economy
means that people have to use recycled material. And this woman is
made out of recycled material," said
Bernhard Schulte, BBM's managing
director.
At the Erema Group's Circonomic
Centre, which was located in a pavilion outside on the fairgrounds, the
waste from the show was being recycled as visitors watched. This included
a mono-material PE pouch solution
that was also produced at K, of which
30% of the material that was recycled was reused to make new pouches. The pouch was the result of a value chain collaboration between
ExxonMobil, Hosokawa Alpine AG,
Erema, and Henkel - just one example of the ways Erema partnered with
resin producers, plastics machinery
manufacturers, recycling machinery
producers, toolmakers, scientific institutions, branch organisations and
more, to show the difference cooperation across the value chain makes.

FKuR's re-usable coffee cup

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019

The green, three-layer HDPE bottle produced by Kautex

As Gerold Breuer, head of marketing & business development, Erema
Group, said proudly: "Circularity is
here." As a nice touch, like the rest of
the Erema team, he wore green
sneakers throughout the duration of
the show.
Mono-material pouches emerged
as a major packaging development at
the show, presented as collaborative
projects between by raw materials
producers, producers of recyclate,
manufacturers of blown film extrusion lines, and packaging experts. At
the Hosokawa Alpine stand, for example, there were the pouches produced with the scope of a project
with resin producer Dow, Brückner
Maschinenbau, and packaging expert
Elba; another pouch, from Coveris
packaging, incorporated PE from Total and was produced on a Hosokawa
Alpine blown film line in a seal layer.
In this pouch, the PET had been successfully replaced by a machine oriented PE film made out of Total's Lumicene Supertough. A further
example was a pouch made from
Exxon's Exceed XP, Exceed and Enable
performance PE polymers, with the
performance PE MDO and sealant
films having been made on Hosokawa Alpine blown film technologies.
At the Reifenhäuser stand, a
heavy-duty mono-material bag for
packaging resin could be seen, a 5-layer PE product of which the inner core
was made from recycled material -
originating from resin bags - and providing a circular solution for waste
bags.
Reusable 'green' cups were another green motif at the fair. At the Billion
S.A.S. booth, for example, the newest
generation of the company's Select
high-speed electrical series, the Select
2, was moulding a coffee cup with an
inner layer made of recycled content.
Bioplastic supplier FKuR was giving
away lidded cups moulded by Dom

➡ Continued on page 26
25

Photo: Caroline Seidel

As a result, deals were struck and
contracts were signed.
"In particular, business with new
customers was very positive this year.
We are also very confident about very
strong follow-up business," said Reifenhäuser.

Plastics News Europe - November/December 2019

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