Plastics manufacturing trends for 2018 – Plastics manufacturing trends 2018 - Arhive

As the European plastics industry wakes up after the Christmas and New Year festivities, we have a fresh calendar before us and a raft of predictions for the year ahead floating around.

Rose Brooke, EPPM Editor, predicts an ‘arms race’ to the lowest-carbon production, with zero-carbon production as the industry’s ‘moon landing’.

‘3D printing’ was the key trend for 2015 and I said last year that if ‘Industry 4.0’ was the buzzword for 2016, then ‘Circular Economy’ would be the buzzword for 2017. In light of the mainstream media trend to wring its hands about the disastrous effects of plastic packaging in the sea, despite rarely offering any news on the goldmine of incredible sorting and processing developments out there thereby raising awareness of what can be done about it, I am going to hazard that ‘Ocean Plastic’ is going to be the stand-out industry influencer of 2018.

Many of the manufacturing trends for 2018 are interlinked with the wider ocean plastics theme, so here are my predictions for the year ahead.

More packaging made with ocean plastics

As with P&G’s Fairy Liquid bottle made with 100 per cent ocean and post-consumer plastics launched in October 2017, following on from the company’s January launch of a Head and Shoulders bottle made with 25 per cent recycled beach plastics, the rest of the consumer packaging industry is watching closely.

There is no doubt in my mind that other major brand-owners want to offer more products made using marine plastics, especially in light of the current media storm surrounding the amount of damaging plastics in the sea. The green pound/euro/dollar is strong right now as conscientious consumers want to act as well as speak of their outrage. I expect to see more marine plastics-made cleaning and bathroom products, but it might be another year or two before marine plastics can be developed for safe and recyclable food contact products.

Design for recycling

Design for recycling is vital for a circular plastics economy but the term has not been given much by way of headline space as yet. I predict that more processors will be using ‘design for recycling’ in their product development, which will hopefully yield alternatives to unrecyclable products such as foil-lined paper food tubes with plastic lids, the way packaging is labelled and decorated, and the use of just one plastic for the whole of the product, rather than multiple materials.

Sorting technology innovation boost

Black food trays keep coming up in recycling debates – they are widely used in European food packaging and yet they are rarely reprocessed. The solution is not necessarily to stop using black food trays but to invest in the technology to make them more sortable in the first place.

Sorting technology, from advanced infrared and magnetic filtering systems to embedding detectable watermarks on plastic products, will be invested in both by manufacturers and local government, as well as at R&D level. Increasingly, it is the technologies that can detect the difficult-to-sort plastics such as sweet wrappers, translucent cartons and dark trays, that will be proving themselves as the innovations that will close the plastic circular economy loop.

Greater emphasis on whole-value-chain carbon efficiency

Plastics’ image took a beating in 2017 but the volume is being turned up on the voices of reason reminding consumers that plastic packaging exists to protect and prolong the lifespan of a product, thereby preventing waste. As well as this, I predict manufacturers will be making more noise about how plastic production can be more carbon-efficient across the whole supply chain, including materials handling, the actual cost of production, and transportation.

This is something we already see in automotive manufacturing, but I believe whole-value-chain carbon efficiency will be given a greater platform in 2018 as manufacturers remind the public just why a product needs to be plastic in the first place.

Machinery arms race for low-carbon production

Just as there was an arms race for plastic processing machinery to be ‘Industry 4.0-ready’, this year, I believe zero-carbon production will be the Moon Landing of plastics. That may not happen in 2018 – it may not happen in 2028, but it’s the plastics manufacturing Holy Grail (not biodegradable plastics, as a BBC journalist tried to argue with me last year), and the lower the carbon emissions and waste water produced in all aspects of plastics manufacturing, the bigger the green bonus points.

Who knows, maybe 2018 will be the year the Smart Factory becomes the Solar Smart Factory? Or the Wind-Powered Smart Factory?

What are your thoughts on our predictions for the big manufacturing trends for 2018? Do you think the marine plastics crisis will hold this much influence over European plastics manufacturing trends in the coming months? Please comment below and let us know your thoughts.

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