K's history marks evolution of plastics

DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY — At a press briefing at the fairground Oct. 10, just several days before K 2013 opened its doors, Messe Düsseldorf's press department manager, Eva Rugenstein, put the event into historical context.

Rugenstein described how the first K fair took place in 1952 in Düsseldorf to the south of the present fairgrounds in downtown Düsseldorf, alongside the Rhine in the premises of the Ehrenhof museum. There were just 200 exhibitors then at Kunststoffe 1952, all of them from Germany.

With 3,218 exhibitors from 59 countries with roughly half of the expected 200,000 visitors from abroad, this year's K dwarfs the original K show. But it also beats K 2010, with 121 more exhibitors and all 19 halls booked, said Werner Mathias Dornscheidt, chairman of Messe Düsseldorf GmbH.

The business situation is "not without clouds everywhere," Dornscheidt said, citing the situation in southern Europe, in particular, and its resulting effect on the plastics industry's customers in the automotive and construction industries.

"But the background conditions for K are much better than three years ago, when the industry was just picking up speed again after a deep recession," Dornscheidt said. He pointed out that countries severely suffering from the euro currency crisis, such as Italy, Spain and even Greece, "are showing a stable or even greater presence compared with 2010".

While the strong German plastics and rubber industry accounts for 40 percent of the overall 171,326 square meters of exhibition space, Italy maintains its traditional second place, taking 26,000 square meters. Net space taken by the five largest Asian exhibitors of China, Taiwan, India, Japan and South Korea has grown about 30 percent from 2010, to almost 25,000 square meters this year.

While US exhibitors, with 5,350 square meters (vs. 4,402 in 2010), are again well-represented, Turkish exhibitors have boosted their 2010 presence from about 3,000 to nearly 4,000 square meters in 2013.

Machinery and equipment suppliers (Halls 1-4 and 9-17) number 1,922 and continue to take their traditional first place by occupying more than two-thirds of the entire exhibition space, Dornscheidt said.

They are followed by 782 materials producers and 354 producers of semi-finished goods, reinforced plastics and technical parts.

Dornscheidt said that K is an essential information platform for designers and production professionals from many industries, including automotive, consumer goods, electrical/electronic, aerospace and construction.

"For them, the K is a must, with producers of plastics and rubber machinery, processing companies, scientific and competence centers all setting research and development yardsticks," he said.

"Nowhere else in the world can the breadth of raw material, processing and application technology be experienced so completely," Dornscheidt said, noting that all important suppliers have prepared innovations for the international audience.

"I am sure that more than 200,000 industry specialists from all over the world will not let the chance go by to experience at K 2013 the trends of today, the developments for tomorrow and the visions for the day after tomorrow," he said.

K 2013 is premiering a number of new events, with universities and research institutes on the new Science Campus area (Hall 7), the PEPSO printed electronics products and solutions pavilion in the north entry area and the Crain Communications Ltd. "Design Chain@K" conference running Oct. 21-22, Dornscheidt said.

With exhibition buildup having started Oct. 2, Dornscheidt talked about the logistics involved with that, beginning with planning for machinery deliveries months beforehand. About 12,000 transport vehicles drove onto the fairgrounds during that time, including as many as 6,000 trucks, some as large as 40 metric tons. That involved 286 fairground staff planning and monitoring the deliveries with a specially developed mobile computer system.

One reason K stands are "so expensive" is that 70 percent of services are underground, Dornscheidt said. He said an additional 175 kilometers of temporary cables were installed just for K. Power consumption is expected to reach a peak of 60,000 kilowatt hours — the equivalent of about 1 million 60-watt light bulbs or the entire power needs of the nearby town of Neuss with its 152,000 inhabitants.

But resources needed to stretch well beyond the fairground, with 23 hotel ships moored up to three abreast along the Rhine just for the fair. Stand staff and exhibitors have taken up hotel rooms as far away as the Dutch border and down to Cologne/Bonn as well as in the Ruhr valley and the "Bergisches Land" hills, he said.

Seasoned K visitors know that the exhibition ticket provides free public bus and train transport to and from the fair within the VRR and VRS transport areas.

Dornscheidt said 25 percent of K exhibitor staff and 40 percent of visitors generally make use of free public transport. The news may come too late to some visitors that they could have ordered their K exhibition tickets online for the first time and printed them at home, he said.

Although stores in Germany in general are not permitted to sell goods on Sundays (with limited exceptions such as near railway stations and in airports, at fairgrounds and gas stations), Sunday, Oct. 20 will be an exception. Düsseldorf shops (excluding Gerresheim and Kaiserswerth suburbs) may open to make sales, but only from 13:00 to 18.00.

As chairman of the K exhibitors advisory council, Ulrich Reifenhäuser gave an overview of the plastics and rubber market status at the Oct. 10 press briefing.

Reifenhäuser, managing director of sales at extrusion machinery maker Reifenhäuser GmbH & Co. KG and chairman of VDMA's German plastics and rubber machinery producers, described plastics "as the most important material of the century."

Worldwide consumption has increased by 9 percent a year on average, Reifenhäuser said, from 1.5 million metric tons in 1950 to 288 million tonnes in 2012 (according to PlasticsEurope Market Research data).

"There is no other material that can show so much growth," he said.

With average annual growth predicted at a more conservative rate of 4 percent through 2016, Reifenhäuser said: "There is no end at all to be seen in this development — even oil or economic crises can't stop it." Asia-Pacific consumption should rise at an above-average rate of 5.5 percent, he noted.

Citing data from BCC Research LLC, he said the global bioplastics market is a relatively small 850,000 metric tons a year but is forecast to rise by some 34 percent annually to more than 3.7 million tonnes in 2016.

Measured growth in industrialized countries with already-high levels of plastics production and consumption is being offset by faster growth in developing countries, Reifenhäuser said. But he noted that "shale gas may change things a lot ... leading to possible 'reindustrialization' of the country."

Reifenhäuser said the overall size of the plastics industry in Germany — with the revenues of machinery, material producers and processors at 88 billion euros, 363,000 employees in 3,280 companies, and a 6 percent share of German industrial production — demonstrates that it is one of the most important industries in the country. And those numbers do not include Germany's rubber industry, with roughly 130 companies that employ 75,000 and had 2012 revenues of 12 billion euros.

Of the estimated 288 million tonnes of worldwide plastics production in 2012, Reifenhäuser said 80 percent goes into plastic products, with the rest used in coatings, adhesives, dispersions, paints and lacquers.

Estimates by the PlasticsEurope show Europe accounting for 21 percent of worldwide plastics consumption in 2011, NAFTA countries for 20 percent, Asia 44 percent (including 23 percent for China), South America 5 percent, the Commonwealth of Independent States 3 percent, and the Middle East/Africa 7 percent.

As for plastics waste recovery, Reifenhäuser said different European regions showed markedly different recovery rates in 2011, with the overall average at 59.6 percent (packaging alone, 67 percent). The nine most successful states in plastics waste recovery — Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland — achieve at least 90 percent recovery, but another seven have achieved an average recovery rate of only 30 percent.

He added, however, that developing uses for recycled plastics is not always easy: "We once sold a machine that could make recycled PET material at half the price of virgin PET, then market prices changed; so, it became 85 percent of the virgin price — so more difficult to sell in the market."

Reifenhäuser ended his talk by touting the intensive preparation that machinery, raw materials suppliers and processors worldwide have made over the past 20-24 months to get ready for K.

"Development departments have worked with high pressure in order to impress trade visitors with innovations meeting requirements for sustainability — saving resources and energy in materials, machines, technology and applications, he said.

"I am convinced there will be a firework of innovations at K, and not just for Reifenhäuser," he said.