Jan H. Schut
Your Business Pricing Update - September 2008
Commodity resin prices were still rising last month, and still more hikes were pending, but market resistance was building.
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Composites: Higher Properties, Lower Cost
Part II of our review of the big JEC international composites show in Paris focuses on resins and reinforcements. (Part I, last month, covered process enhancements, thermoplastic composites, machinery, and tooling. See Learn More box.)
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Prices Hit Scarey Levels
The athletes in Beijing aren’t the only ones taking record leaps this summer.
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Feedstocks Drive Up Prices
Prices of all sorts of commodity and engineering thermoplastics and thermosets are rising by leaps and bounds, reacting to equally strong increases in feedstock costs. PE PRICES UP SHARPLYPE prices moved up 3¢/lb in May, after a 3¢ increase in April.
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Composites Embrace Mass Production
The focus this year at the international JEC Composites Show in Paris was not so much on brand-new processes as on adapting existing processes and materials for mass production, especially of large parts with critical structural demands. Attracting the most attention was wind energy, where composite material usage is growing more than 17%/yr, according to Gurit (formerly SP Systems), a Swiss-based global prepreg supplier with U.S. operations.
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Disk Pump Helps Compound Long-Fiber Thermoplastics
Already a familiar sight on European store shelves, the eye-catching appeal of "IML" is gaining traction among North American injection molders. The latest tooling and automation designs can handle the higher volumes needed here.
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Feedstocks Push Resin Prices
Despite lackluster domestic demand, relentless increases in feedstock costs are forcing suppliers to push for higher resin prices.
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Your Business Pricing Update - May 2008
Commodity resin producers keep pushing for price increases, but their success is limited by weak market demand and soft prices of many monomers.
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First Commercial Recycling Process For Electronics Waste
A 23-year-old Dutch plastic recycling firm, Plastic Herverwerking Brabant (PHB) BV has become the first supplier in the world of a complete commercial altered-density-media system tailored to separate the plastics in waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). Since last October, PHB has operated a WEEE recycling system sized for 33 million lb/yr and averages about 4400 lb/hr of reclaimed material from 11,000 lb/hr of waste input.
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New Look in PVC Siding
Tom Loper is a serial entrepreneur. Currently, he’s president, CEO, and co-founder of NuCedar Mills Inc. in Chicopee, Mass., which makes the first foamed PVC siding on the market.
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More Choices for Grinding, Shredding
Many granulators on display at the K 2007 show in Dusseldorf last October were big models—150 to 200 hp—to enable higher throughputs or reclaiming larger parts and chunks. For example, Rapid Granulator from Sweden brought out the 600 model, the largest in its “open-hearted” series, which allow fast access to all internal components. It has a 600-mm-diam. rotor, 100 mm more than the next largest size.
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