By 2030, 30% of leadership roles to be held by women, says BASF

A new insulation board composed of residual and waste materials such as cork and corncobs, waterborne resins based on lignin, and using mineral fillers as flame retardants has been developed by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF.

Licella, an Australian renewable energy start-up, has developed a patented hydrothermal upgrading technology, which uses water under high temperature and pressure, to chemically recycle End-of-Life  - waste  - back to the oil they originally came from. 

Do compostable products disintegrate fast enough to be disposed of at today’s industrial organic waste treatment facilities? According to a recent study from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, indeed they do. 

MonoSol, part of the Japanese specialty chemical company Kuraray, has announced plans to build a new production facility in Poland for manufacturing polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) water-soluble films. 

Despite declining sales and a halved net profit for the fourth quarter of 2019,  Covestro achieved its targets, said CEO Markus Steilemann. “We have a solid financial base,” he stressed, speaking at the annual financial press conference in Düsseldorf 19 February.

Using state-of-the-art technologies developed by Norwegian sorting expert Tomra, post-consumer polystyrene waste content can now be sorted with extremely high final product purity, Ineos reports.

As Interpack, the packaging trade fair in Düsseldorf that comes around once every three years, approaches, a number of themes are starting to emerge.

Plastics machinery producer Engel Austria has a longstanding market presence in Japan. The company is now underpinning that position with the founding of a new sales and service subsidiary in Tokyo.

Last week Friday saw the inauguration ceremony for the new Graf Competence Center for Raw Materials in Herbolzheim, Germany, a €35million investment made by Otto Graf GmbH, to set up plastics processing and recycling facilities that will ensure a constant and consistent supply of raw materials to the company.