British Plastics & Rubber Magazine - Blog

Time to pay for lunch

2010-01-12T13:41:00.002Z

ColourTone Masterbatch MD Tony Gaukroger is proposing that when a colorant supplier carries out a colour match for a customer, the customer should pay for the service. Nothing particularly dramatic about that, but apparently it flies in the face of convention. Colour matching has always been part of the deal when buying colour, and its cost is built into the masterbatch price. What Tony Gaukroger is pushing against is the disproportionate use made of free colour matching by companies that want to offer their customers a choice of colour samples, and who ultimately buy a relatively small volume of masterbatch compared to other companies with fewer matching demands that buy big volumes.

I can't pretend to know a lot about the way masterbatch contracts are drawn up or how tenacious processors would be to retain their free colour matching. But I can guess from experience that taking away the free service would raise a few hackles.

In many ways the concept is akin to the way we publish magazines and websites. Basically, you the reader, get the service for nothing. Its costs are paid for by advertisers who want to catch your eye. And, primarily for magazines when there is a measurable cost for producing the physical product and shipping it to you, the quid pro quo is that you should be recognisable as someone an advertiser may want to do business with.

Over my years of involvement with British Plastics & Rubber I have had some amazingly vitriolic phone calls from people to whom I declined to send the magazine because they did not meet the readership terms drawn up to present an appropriate readership profile to our advertisers. How dare I not send them a magazine? It was their right to receive one. They were born with a silver magazine in their mouths.

And there is the other side of the coin, the companies who expect us to help them promote their wares but are not prepared to invest in advertising them. I recall a conversation with a marketing manager (how did she get the job?) who told me proudly that her company didn't buy advertising, it did everthing through free PR.

Not in my magazine it didn't.

So if Tony Gaukroger at ColourTone aims to charge for colour matching, I'm guessing he will upset a few people.

Of course, these upsets will eventually fade away if what he is proposing becomes the norm. And there's the rub. Because there will always be someone who will use such a situation to advantage. Mr Gaukroger is aiming to convince the members of the British Plastics Federation Masterbatch and Technical Compounds Group to follow his thinking. But while the group consists of 15 of the country's major masterbatch producers, the last (pre-recession) estimate I had was that there are 40 - 50 masterbatch producers in this country. And I would bet a pound to pinch of snuff that if colour match charging became the norm, there would be plenty of masterbatch producers willing to throw in free colour matching to secure business. And I would make the same bet that there would be plenty of plastics processors putting pressure on the colour companies to do just that.

Never mind the quality, feel the width

2009-12-01T19:45:00.000Z

I don't know whether bisphenol A is harmful or not. I do know that a lot of people think it is and they seemingly outnumber the people who think it isn't. Public health and safety is not the X Factor. Sheer weight of numbers should not be the arbiter. But right or wrong, I think it will be.

     The latest attack on polycarbonate baby bottles came today in the publication of a report, supporting a call for a ban, from Breast Cancer UK. It was followed smartly by a riposte from the British Plastics Federation. The Breast Cancer UK report assembles a lot of published research findings and knits them together with the results of a YouGov survey carried out on-line last week.

     The BPF's response to the campaign looks at first sight a little ineffectual. Its scientific rebuttal of some 75 references to research and scientific opinion is a restatement of the Food Standards Agency's view that, in essence, "we and our European colleagues set a threshold for BPA intake that isn't exceeded in normal practice, so the use of BPA is safe". And the BPF then goes on to criticise the research and split hairs about the wording. It says "Contrary to many of the press reports on the Breast Cancer UK campaign the use of BPA in baby bottles has not been banned or restricted by the Canadian government." Not, note, that Breast Cancer UK had said that BPA had been banned in Canada, but that press reports of the campaign had said that. In fact the report does acknowledge that restrictions have not yet been implemented – but it is quite clear that this is just procedural timing and that it is going to happen. The BPF does not mention what the report also quotes, that in some states in the USA legislation to ban polycarbonate bottles has been enacted and they are counting down to actual enforcement.

     I don't know how much notice the BPF had of the start of this campaign, but it does look as if it was caught slightly on the back foot in its response. It does have a position statement on its web site which includes a very recent statement on BPA safety by PlasticsEurope, but even this looks a little thin when compared to the mass of research thrown in by the anti-BPA brigade.

     And this, I think, is what will ultimately settle the safety question. Whether or not a ban on BPA in food contact products is justified, it will be pressed home by the combination of real research, loaded opinion polls asking questions like "To what extent do you agree or disagree that it is important that the UK Government acts in a precautionary way when it comes to protecting babies and very young children from BPA?" (is it any surprise that only 5 per cent of respondents said they disagreed?), a view that if in doubt ban it, the insinuation of commercial interest at work to maim children for profit, and the hysteria of a million American moms on the internet.

Education, education, innovation

2009-11-25T19:04:00.002Z

The opening of the Borealis Innovation Centre in Linz, Austria, last week was an object lesson in joined up technology. The centre is not just a means of developing polyolefin products and applications. It is a propagator for seedcorn.

     All the moulding machines, pipe extrusion lines and film plants on which Borealis has lavished millions are nothing without the engineers to run them and to extrapolate from what they do. And the importance of creating the engineers was something the company rammed home over and over again at the centre's inauguration.

     Linz is in Upper Austria, an area rich in plastics processors and suppliers of equipment and materials which is rather unoriginally referred to as "plastics valley" – perhaps a misnomer for an area so substantially hilly. The government of Upper Austria has recognised that a plastics industry today isn't necessarily a plastics industry tomorrow. Industry doesn't stand still. As regional governor Josef Pühringer said at the inauguration: "When the future is on offer you have to react quickly or someone else will beat you to it". The threat from neighbouring Central European countries is all too clear; they have economics on their side and physical links to Western European markets are not so different from Austria's, so the way to stay ahead is to be better technologically.

     Upper Austria has expanded the polymer technology education at its local universities, with both its own funding and funding from plastics industry companies. And Borealis has added a catch-'em-young process of welcoming local school students in for a once-a-week session on polymer technology backed up by summer holiday courses.

     Local industry has aligned with local government to fund and manage local education to benefit, protect and expand local industry and local government. In this country we seem to be lacking a couple of critical masses – the international companies running research centres and local government with sufficient autonomy to recognise and pay for industry support on a need-to-do basis. Which makes what links there are between our universities, colleges and forward-looking companies all the more important.

Welsh get Carried Away with bag vendetta

2009-11-16T19:39:00.000Z

According to a press release from the Welsh Assembly 97·3 per cent of litter in Wales is rubbish other than plastic bags, as is 97·9 per cent of litter found on beaches. That doesn't sound too bad, does it? Hardly a problem that needs draconian measures like taxing people for accepting a bag from a retailer.

     Of course, the Assembly didn't quite put it like that. It presented the figures the other way round to show that bags are 2·7 per cent of all litter and 2·1 per cent of litter found on beaches (still not a lot it seems, given the fuss being made). The aim was to support (justify?) its new "Get Carried Away" campaign for people to get used to carrying a reusable shopping bag ahead of its planned charge on single-use carrier bags coming in in 2011.

     I still can't get my head round the logic behind these anti-bag campaigns. The Welsh Assembly tells us: "Each year an estimated 320 million bags are handed out in Wales and it takes between 500 and 1,000 years for them to degrade." So what? This is only relevant if these bags are dropped in the street or sent straight to landfill. If, on the other hand, the people of Wales are responsible in their attitude to littering, and use their supermarket shoppers for other things for which they might otherwise buy additional bags, the problem perceived by the Welsh Assembly becomes a lot less pertinent. And if the Welsh Assembly put into place a practical means of collecting bags for recycling – with other mixed household plastics – then it would really be doing something useful.

     Personally, I like an occasional supermarket shopper blowing in the wind. Every day I walk a couple of miles to get a newspaper, and along the way I pick up the litter dropped in the otherwise pleasant leafy lanes around my home. I used to use a Sainsbury's bag which most often was about adequate. But since Sainsbury's and the other bag-bothering supermarkets cut off my supply of decent carrier bags I have been forced to use the micro-thin bags still allowed for wrapping fruit and other perishables, which are all my wife can filch in reasonable quantity. And these really don't cut it. So finding a decent size and strength shopping bag can often be the difference between picking up the litter at the end of the walk or leaving it until the next day.

     The point to this anecdote is that finding a carrier bag is actually quite a rare occurrence (not much more so than before the supermarkets cut off the supply). There is no shortage of other litter. PET bottles, of course – and glass bottles and aluminium cans which seldom seem to get a mention with all this preoccupation with the blight of plastics packaging. I mustn't forget the card cigarette packets either. And the paper detritus. There is plenty of litter to pick up, only some of which is plastic, and normally very little to none of which is carrier bags. I wonder where they all are. They must be in Wales.

Pharmaceuticals sale is a tonic for plastics

2009-09-28T11:26:00.000+01:00

Over the past decade big ticket chemical companies have been moving away from the dirty end of industrial chemicals, including plastics and rubber, and towards the sweeter smelling life sciences sector of health care and agriculture. Hoechst, Bayer, DSM, and others have sold or put up for sale parts of their historical polymer empires to don white coats instead of blue overalls.

     So it came as a welcome trend reversal today to see Solvay agree the sale of its pharmaceuticals business to fund expansion in plastics and other chemicals. Maybe life science is becoming a tad crowded now.

     Of course, Solvay is looking at the top end of the plastics business for its growth: it has itself pulled out of polyolefins – although still has a very large foot in PVC – and has gathered a growing portfolio of esoteric high performance materials.

     It is encouraging that in a world where today's shareholder opinion can count for more than tomorrow's industrial strategy, Solvay is showing that plastics is still a sector to bank on.

Bag tax fatigue?

2009-09-25T16:03:00.002+01:00

Ireland's plan to double the tax on plastic bags poses some interesting questions. The reason widely quoted is to provide a "sufficient deterrent" to people not taking their own bags to the supermarket. But isn't that more or less what the original tax was meant to achieve?

The fact that the Irish government is having to re-impose a punitive tax surely means that in the long term such taxation doesn't work. It would seem that the Irish people now have some sort of bag tax fatigue and the original penalty is no longer effective.

Of course it may be that the government is simply looking for an extra crust of taxation. But at Eur 120 million over seven years this is hardly a money-spinner. And as with all punitive taxation there is a law of diminishing returns.

Waste not...

2009-06-23T17:51:00.006+01:00

Waste plastics in various forms have been in the news this past month. The British Plastics Federation has joined with Surfers Against Sewage in a move to prevent sea pollution by moulding pellets; the CAP-SCRAP project is nearing the end of its first year and showing some useful results in the prevention and re-use of scrap in injection moulding; and WRAP has produced figures to show that it is economically feasible to recycle mixed household plastics.

The BPF is targeting waste from plastics plants in its move to prevent pollution by “mermaids’ tears”, which it is identifying as pellets lost from plastics plants into drains and thence to rivers and finally the sea. While some of the pollution found on beaches may well have arrived this way, these small plastics particles are also either the result of attrition of larger plastics litter, or have been lost from cargo ships: a quick breeze through Google shows that around 10,000 containers are lost from ships every year, and a container measures around 70 m³, so if only one was full of moulding pellets that’s a helluva lot of mermaids’ tears.

Nonetheless the BPF is encouraging processors to sign up to Operation Clean Sweep, a pledge to improve housekeeping, and even if it doesn’t make much difference to beach pollution, as BPF president Paul Jukes said, “Losing plastic pellets is bad for the environment, bad housekeeping and doesn’t make economic sense. We must all do our bit to prevent this happening.”

So how much worse then to not just lose pellets, but to add processing cost to them and then throw them away? The BPF is also a partner in the CAP-SCRAP project and has reported on the first year’s operation. One surprising detail in the report is that “significant volumes (of process waste) are still being dumped rather than re-used”.

The project seeks to find credible means to confirm the quality of recycled process scrap to allay doubts about final product performance, and also to improve monitoring of the process to give instrumented confirmation of melt quality rather than rely on subjective judgement.

I rather thought that such technology already existed. So perhaps the impulse here should be more one of confidence building than technological research.

And so to a particular hobby horse of mine. Mixed plastics recycling.

WRAP – the government’s recycling advisory body – has come up with some pretty convincing figures to show that mixed plastics packaging could be added to the current bottle sortation from domestic rubbish, and although increasing the cost of collection, would yield a financial return.

The Daily Telegraph was quick to suggest a flaw in the process: that householders may resent being asked to sort food trays and other plastics into yet another bin. WRAP’s response was that “people are actually demanding to recycle this material.”

And there I think lies one of the two misconceptions in recycling domestic waste: that everybody wants to do it. Sure, a lot of people do, but I’m equally certain that a lot of people can’t be bothered. And if to make the process viable it becomes necessary to enforce collection, the value of the recyclate is going to be questionable.

The other misconception is “kerbside sorting” which somehow conjures a vision of men in hi-vis jackets going through your rubbish and filing it into dedicated pigeon holes on the cart. Have you ever watched your recycling being collected?

What is actually meant is kitchen sorting. And I would suggest that there is an inverse ratio between the amount of sorting needed, and the volume of good recyclable waste.

I echo my sentiment when Recoup published its guide to all-the-things-you-won’t-be-allowed-to-do-when-recycling-mixed-plastics earlier this year: until technology can do the sorting from a single household plastics fraction, we should concentrate on energy recovery.

Giving plastics 20:20 visibility

2009-05-07T22:13:00.004+01:00

I joined several other trade press editors in a round table brain picking session this morning as the British Plastics Federation, Packaging and Films Association and Plastics Europe rolled out their plans for a Plastics 2020 Challenge campaign to improve the image of plastics. And what a tall order that is. Their aim is to right the prejudices and ignorance that have built up about plastics, their environmental position, and especially the environmental effect of plastics packaging and the whole onward complexity of recycling and resource efficiency.

No-one needs to know how plastics are made, or how things are made from them. As a result too few people understand what plastics do and the benefits they bring. The light weight, resilient plastic bottle is still inferior to a proper – but heavy, brittle and dangerous – glass equivalent. Film wrapping on a piece of fruit or a vegetable that nature gave its own wrapper is mocked as absurd, even as unwrapped contemporaries are gently rotting. My Dad's reaction to finding that what he thought he had bought as a brass movement clock was "just bits of plastic" was typical of failing to match price with perception.

We have taken all the benefits that plastics bring for granted. So it is little wonder that when a scapegoat is needed for our declining environment we light on the problems that plastics represent rather than the good they have done. Yes, plastics are choking the North Pacific Gyre; they are largely made from non-renewable resources; they last a long time if you put them in a hole in the ground; some contain chemicals that cause laboratory animals pain when they are overdosed. But all these things need to be put in perspective.

I hope that the Plastics 2020 Challenge taken up by the BPF, PAFA and Plastics Europe actually does put everything into perspective. There are legitimate concerns about plastics and these perceived problems should be acknowledged – not necessarily as problems, but as inevitable effects. The task will be a delicate one. Any suggestion that this is an apologist campaign will likely draw a knee jerk reaction from the anti-anything-not-Environmental brigade.

Of course, whether the public elects not to take its packaging home from the supermarket, or buys polyester instead of polycarbonate baby bottles, or makes futile gestures by boycotting plastic-wrapped goods, makes little ultimate difference. What does make a difference is when uninformed public opinion leads to poorly formed legislation. So to keep the law makers on side it is necessary for the public to be informed and comfortable.

To paraphrase an old saying, when you've got them by the ballot box, their hearts and minds will follow.

The Henry Ford School for Colorists

2009-04-30T19:58:00.003+01:00

Let me apologise right away if I'm trampling on people's beliefs or sacrificing their sacred cows. Maybe I'm a closet Philistine, or simply lacking romantic perception. But I just don't get the annual forecast of "influential" colour trends.

Every year the major colorant suppliers and the fashionistas give us their predictions of the colours that are going to excite people's emotions in the coming year. They speak earnestly about social trends and lifestyle choices and other intangibles, and formulate themed colour ranges that when applied to tomorrow's products and packaging will attract and entice people to buy.

To me this is the science of self-fulfilling prophesy.

A few years ago it seemed that every new car was painted silver. I don't believe that the car buying public en masse said "we must have silver cars". It seems rather more likely that given the choice of silver or red or silver or blue or silver or green, the majority opted for silver. And it may be that having seen new shiny silver cars on the road, new buyers followed the herd. But had the forecasters decided that red was to be the new silver, to paraphrase a tired cliché, the resulting distortion of colour choice would have filled the roads with red cars.

Consensus on colour is clearly important for people to make a choice of what they wear or how they furnish their houses and be able to match or tone different items. But to achieve this consensus the colourists are not so much predicting what people want, as agreeing what they can have. And I'm not sure that the consensus is always that consensual. For instance, Clariant assures us that "The bright primary colours that were popular over the last few years are disappearing." But go to www.fashiontrendsetter.com and right next to Clariant's ColorForward 2010 is the TFL Fashion Colors for Leather for next spring and summer with a dozen Pantone colours, including a very strong red, blue and yellow.

My seeming obsession with colour prediction is only a passing vapour. I am at the moment putting together the content for the next issue of the magazine which will lean rather more heavily than usual towards colouring, and I have picked up somewhat belatedly the announcement of Clariant's 2010 predictions. I expect more will be along shortly from the likes of Pantone, Gabriel Chemie and others.

Of course, predicting social trends does put the forecasters at risk of being subverted by events. I wonder when this year's colour trends were drawn up, if the forecasters had had a better tuned crystal ball, would we be seeing Recession Red, Bankruptcy Black or Pig Flu Blue?

Don't cut costs by cutting contact with customers

2009-04-29T17:44:00.002+01:00

I called in at Colortronic's open house celebrating its 35 years in business yesterday. It was pretty much as I remembered the last time I went to a Colortronic open day. There was no reason for it to be much different of course, except for one thing: the recession.

There was talk of how difficult business conditions were, but only if a visitor dropped it into the conversation. Otherwise the ambience in the showroom was as if it was business as usual, which basically it was. The public may have knotted its purse strings for the time being, but people still need to buy packaged food in the short term and will want to add or replace consumer goods in the long term. And companies supplying those needs will need to improve/replace/expand their processing equipment.

Colortronic hasn't jettisoned its marketing in an attempt to balance the books. It is continuing to remind people what it does and what it can do for them. And by opening its doors this week with a touch of lunchtime hospitality it is sending a clear signal that it takes business and its customers seriously and values its communication with them.

Packaging protects – against financial instability

2009-03-31T19:35:00.001+01:00

Given the volatile times in which we live, it is something of a relief to read a boring annual report. That is not to say that Rexam's annual report lacks sparkle in its presentation. It's just that there are no whizz bang doom and gloom elements. No crashing profits. Escalating losses. Veiled warnings of "restructuring".

Rexam is passing through the maelstrom with seemingly no more than a little local turbulence. Chief executive Leslie van de Walle says it all: "Even in times of recession, people continue to eat, drink and take care of their health – three areas where we are a supplier of choice."

Rexam's figures are the wrong side of right. Profits are down on increased sales and earnings per share are down about a third. But in those figures is the pre-recession disposal of some businesses and pre-emptive action against energy and transport costs. The company has its metaphorical hatches battened down and is planning no major growth investments in 2009.

The spectre of plant closures has not been fully exorcised – Mr van de Walle says "If market conditions are such that we have to mothball or take out further capacity, we will do so." But somehow that seems more controlled and acceptable than the panic measures announced of late in other markets.

Tarred with the same BPA brush

2009-03-14T11:30:00.004Z

Reports that major US manufacturers of baby bottles have ceased using polycarbonate have triggered new calls in this country to stop the sale of baby bottles containing bisphenol A. The story reached prominence on this morning's BBC television news, and unfortunately once again underlined the false logic that can too easily take control and could create unwarranted concern among the general public. The logic assumes that because baby bottles are made from a type of plastic containing bisphenol A, that all plastics contain bisphenol A, and so all plastics are a health risk.

In this morning's report one presenter referred to all food containers – "like Tupperware" – as containing bisphenol A. This might cause dismay in the legal departments of Tupperware Brands Corporation in Orlando, Florida. But my dismay was that the remark was made in a conversation with someone from an association – I missed her introduction – who had been brought on to the programme to add authority and who clearly understood what bisphenol A was and where it was used. But she allowed a totally incorrect and alarming suggestion to pass without comment.

Chemicals, babies and health together make good emotive news copy. And there may or may not be real cause for concern over bisphenol A. But the suggestion that every man jack of us might be exposed to this devil chemical because it's in all the plastic wrapped round our food – and expressing that concern unchallenged on national television – can create unnecessary public anxiety and all that goes with allaying it.

It is too much to expect that the BBC's news desk should be staffed with experts on everything under the sun. But it is not too much to expect that when a complicated technical subject is under discussion, the responsible media should field experts to the discussion who can keep the subject in balance and the facts from the fiction.

To be fair, the BBC did include Steve Elliot from the Chemical Industries Association in the report, but only on tape to put an industry balance on risks or otherwise from bisphenol A. Not in a context where he would be able to moderate uninformed remarks from a presenter, whose contribution seemed to be ad hoc and unimpeded by research into the facts.

Mixed troubles

2009-03-02T20:55:00.001Z

Recoup has just published its guide to recycling mixed plastics packaging. The recommendations read like an obstacle course.

The guide is pitched at those that collect and handle household waste – essentially local authorities – and warns from the start to collect "only materials which can be sorted and have sustainable and auditable market outlets." It adds "It is important to consider the impact of collecting mixed plastics packaging on the output quality of other sorted materials such as newspapers and magazines, cardboard and steel and aluminium cans." And for good measure: "The addition of mixed plastics into an existing 'plastic bottle' material grade will significantly reduce the overall sales value, but at the same time the tonnage collected will increase. It is not specified in these guidelines whether collectors should mix the bottles and other rigid plastic packaging together. However, the end markets for non bottle packaging plastics are more limited at the current time with consequent commercial implications."

Having disincentivised the collectors and handlers the guide goes on to tell them what they can – or more specifically, what they can't – recycle. So, they can take pots, tubs and trays used in the house...but not if they're black because the optical sorters downstream won't see them and they will stay in the waste. No film please, because it's not worth much and may cause malfunctions in the automatic sorting equipment.

Packaging only. Things like toys or furniture can contain different plastics types and metal inserts which could add contamination.

No food waste because of "potential implications". So householders must rinse contamination from their packaging before putting it out.

Household only – no garage or greenhouse waste.

And watch out for biodegradables because "plastic reprocessors regard bio-degradable plastic as contaminants and may reject loads containing such materials". That one's going to trip up even the most dedicated recycler.

The reasons for rejecting these components of mixed plastics waste are, of course, perfectly valid. I just wonder whether, with all these traps to avoid, anyone will bother to recycle mixed plastics. The householder can readily remember to identify glass/metals/paper/plastic bottles and segregate them accordingly. And if he/she doesn't they are relatively straightforward to separate once collected.

But add in the rest of the Commandments and there's a risk of one or more of three things happening: the householder finds it all too fiddly; the householder tries and fails and reduces well-intentioned recycling to landfill; the collector ends up with deliberately/accidentally contaminated recyclable materials that are no longer recyclable and not yielding a return for the effort.

The guide says that "instructions for householders on what to put out for collection should be unambiguous and easy to follow." I hope they will be but I don't have a lot of faith.

I don't want to appear to be making light of Recoup's efforts in producing this guide, but it seems to me that the desire to recycle is running ahead of the means. It is important that we develop an infrastructure for recycling as much as we can, but not at the risk of negating the achievements that have already been made. Until adequate technology exists for extracting the most from an input stream that's been put together with the minimum of fuss, we should fall back to a policy of recycling the obvious and recovering energy from what's left.

¤ I had just finished writing this when I turned on the television to see a man with a wheelie bin full of plastics packaging driving round the country (!) to find a way of disposing of it. Despite being told how the whole lot could be incinerated to generate electricity, or how if it hadn't been jumbled up in the first place it could have been recycled, and skirting with a heavy-handed production cut the suggestion that without it the original food contents would not have been so fresh when delivered to the customer, he ended up returning it to an equally silly woman apparently storing all her plastic rubbish in an aquarium in her front room.

Add this kind of selective misunderstanding to the obstacle course in the Recoup recommendations and the likelihood of a commonsense approach to the disposal of plastics waste drifts slowly away. To the celebrated Sargasso Sea of (inevitably) plastic waste spinning around the Pacific, perhaps.

You can read the Recoup recommendations at www.recoup.org/pix/domestic_plastics.pdf

Spending out of a recession is the right way to go when it means investing for the recovery

2009-02-20T19:19:00.001Z

Germany's machinery manufacturers expect to be hard hit this year with a slump of around 20 per cent on last year's record sales. But the man in charge of the plastics and rubber sector of the country's machinery manufacturers' association, Thorsten Kühmann, is putting a brave face on it and pointing to the potential for recovery.

He says that industrial projects have been postponed or temporarily suspended because of financial constraints, and that these are likely to get off the ground once the crisis of confidence in the banking sector has been overcome.

When that happens, costs will start rising again, and processors will need top-notch equipment to keep manufacturing costs under control – and, of course, that's where German equipment comes in.

But nationalism or commercialism aside, whether companies buy German or any other equipment, getting on top of manufacturing efficiency is going to be crucial. In Mr Kühmann's words "only those who put their company on a sound footing during the crisis will be in a position to benefit when the next upturn comes."

Hear hear.

Bag banning back in Britain

2009-02-13T13:40:00.001Z

It looks like we're up and running on a new plastic bag ban saga.

Bans on supermarket shoppers are popping up with fierce regularity around the world, but they seem so much more significant when they affect our own islands.

The Irish did it – well, not a ban, but a punitive tax – in 2002 and set the ball rolling worldwide. Although it was not the Irish government that first took action. That doubtful honour fell to the state of Uttar Pradesh in India which in 2000 banned plastic bags because of the litter problem and the death by choking of thousands of sacred cows.

Since then towns, provinces and countries have all boarded the bandwagon to skim the surface of environmental credibility and tackle the symptoms while ignoring the problem.

Closer to home, the little seaside town of Modbury took a stand in 2007 against the effect on wildlife of discarded plastic bags and imposed its own ban.

Then we have had the failed attempts in the Scottish Parliament to impose punitive taxation, followed by an equally unsuccessful attempt to ban free supermarket bags in London.

Now the Welsh Assembly is having a go. It was mooted towards the end of last year when the Sustainability Committee of the National Assembly of Wales recommended the imposition of a levy on carrier bags and recently the Assembly's Environment Minister Jane Davidson has been consulting with the Irish Environment Minister John Gormley on Ireland's experience.

Inevitably there has been wrangling in the Assembly chamber over the aims and effects of a ban on free bags, from welcoming a stand against an environmental scourge, to warnings of the economic effects of cutting plastic bag consumption. What I find telling is that one of the sticking points seems to be what to do with the money raised. The Assembly is able to impose a charge, thereby causing all sorts of economic repercussions, but is not empowered to decide how the revenue is spent. So the imperitive seen by some for taking plastic bags out of circulation is actually secondary to the political decision on spending the money.

While the politicians scramble for brownie (or should it be greenie?) points for taking plastic bags out of the environment too few, it seems, go the full mile to fully evaluate the problem or the effects of the solution.

After the story about the latest moves in Wales was published on this web site John McLoughlin from the Manchester Polymer Group mailed in this comment:

"Nothing like plastic bags to get the politicians to be seen to be doing something about the environment, eh? When Mr Pringle from the Scottish Assembly was approached by John Sale (ex BPI manager who carried out probably the most extensive LCA on carrier bags), who offered to provide facts rather than recycled assumptions, he stated he wasn’t interested in facts! Charlie Geddes (SPRA) had a similar response from the Rt Hon Gordon Brown, his MP.

"Funnily enough, Mr Meacher (then Environment Minister) declined our (Manchester Polymer Groups) invitation to attend a talk given by John Sale a couple of years ago."

The simple view is that plastic bags contaminate the environment and, even when dealt with properly, occupy space in landfill. The deeper view is that plastic bags don't contaminate the environment – the people who put them there do and those most likely to do so are least likely to be deterred by a few pence on the bottom of the bill. And yes, they do go to landfill, but very often as containers for other waste which will simply be replaced by bags bought for the purpose.

On top of that, of course, is the whole carefully studied consideration of total environmental impact which clearly is a positive case for plastic bags in the context of the alternatives needed to get the primary job done.

It doesn't make sense to put your shopping in a plastic bag to take it home, and then throw that bag away. But it makes even less sense to put your shopping in a paper bag which has had a greater impact on the environment to produce and transport, and then throw that away to cause further environmental damage (paper produces methane as it decomposes). Reusable bags? Certainly, provided they haven't been made on the other side of the world by sweat-shop labour then transported here at higher environmental cost than that of shipping plastic granules. Bio/photo-degradable bags? If you're waiting to see litter disappear you've got a long wait.

Plastic shopping bags do have a disposal problem, but until all considerations of life cycle environmental impact can be bettered by an alternative, they are the best option we have for getting home the shopping.

I like to imagine the reaction from the public to applying the plastic bag strategies of "environmentally aware" politicians to an even bigger environmental problem – and one that costs thousands of lives annually.

Ban the motor car.