Community Insight - SpecialChem 4 Polymers

Plastics Trends Analysis

Our industry experts regularly analyze the evolution of SpecialChem Members preferences and share with you unique aggregated data!
Our ever-growing community and unique position in the market allow us to have exclusive insight on key information our members share with us, such as the performances they seek or the markets they serve.

Below you will find a list of Community Insights.

Focus of the month

Old-basics still apply to increase the use of Biopolymers July, 2010
	Some old basics still apply to the latest innovations: this may sound like a paradoxical sentence for some of us; but overall this is what applies to the latest areas of the polymer industry. How can we come to such a conclusion? Well, when looking at the below June 2010 Click’N Vote results we see the SpecialChem4Polymers community raised several old basics when being asked on...

Past Community Insights

	June, 2010 - Growing use of antimicrobials The growing use of polymers in the healthcare market is often said to lead the growing use of antimicrobials in the coming years. Another strong driver that is commonly accepted from the latest publications is telling that hospitals-acquired infections (with the well-known nosocomial infections) is pushing even further for an increased use of antimicrobials in medical applications. Looking into more details allows a fine-tuning of these above statements: our society is more and more looking at...

	May, 2010 - Dispersing Polymer Additives & Fillers: A Critical Property A key improvement in polymer additives and fillers is how to ease their dispersion into the polymer matrix. Whether the ultimate goal is to increase production line output, thus reducing manufacturing cost, or to increase the compounded polymer performances, dispersion has a good chance of being an important factor. But how important a role it plays, also depends on...

	April, 2010 - Increased Pressure on Phthalates Phthalates have long been under the spotlights both in Europe and North America due to their potential effects on human health and bans that have been implemented in these two regions. Unsurprisingly, the SpecialChem community is also very active when it deals with PVC and plasticizers, but it is also critical to note that the April 2010 meetings of a panel of experts designated by the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) will fuel even more the debate around phthalates!

	March, 2010 - Polypropylene trends towards increased performances Although polypropylene is often perceived as a low cost and light weight solution there is a significant trend toward using this high volume polymer in increasingly demanding applications. Therefore increased performances are required. This trend is already well-known: as stated in the November 2009 article written by Jennifer Markarian, "Additives Enable Polypropylene to Penetrate New Applications and Compete with More Expensive Resins", PP is often selected to replace more expensive resins that were initially selected to replace metal. Detailing this trend with data and understanding the latest moves from the SpecialChem community confirmed this trend… and broke down some too-fast statements!

	February, 2010 - Facts & Challenges of Polymer Recycling By detecting similarities in the latest SpecialChem member posts and other polymer related literatures we identified some on-going ideas on the recycling of polymers. But when confronting these on-going ideas to other SpecialChem member posts and data we were able to differentiate the right ideas from the wrong ones. Recycling of polymer is going ahead, but not everybody is following the trend, obviously. Let's see the common mistakes in the light of facts & data.

	January, 2010 - Insight on 2009's most popular topics of the SpecialChem Community As 2009 has just ended, it is the right time to take a step back, and look at all the technical articles published on SpecialChem4polymers.com in 2009. Hence, we reviewed and selected the 10 most popular articles of the year gone by. Such analysis allows a better understanding of the most interesting topics for the Polymer Manufacturing and Compounding industries.

	December, 2009 - Insight on the SpecialChem Community using Biocides As we have heard of a growing use of biocides these past months, we thought it would be worth building an update on the SpecialChem Community using Biocides. Bactericides remain the most used biocides, representing...

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