'Plastics processors are angry', said Alexandre Dangis, speaking on June 1st , 2012 at the EuPC Annual Meeting in Vienna (Austria) about the mounting raw material cost increases and the associated large number of 'forces majeures' in Europe. The head of the industry's Brussels organisation, European Plastics Converters Association, believes that this trend will slow down the recovery in the industry, just at a point when growth is appearing in the marketplace.EuPC is setting up a monitoring scheme and a Hotline to analyse the 'forces majeures' of polymer suppliers in Europe and calling all plastics converters that are facing supply difficulties to keep track of the files . For several years 'forces majeures' have been invoked by suppliers with increasing frequency. They are a real issue seriously undermining their reliability in the eyes of customers. Some raw material producers are putting their customers on allocation or simply 'on hold'.Some are on 'non delivery'. Others to be fair are trying to deal with the real issues.
'There is a real case for start setting up a standard or competition for 'Excellence in Polymer Supply in Europe' where the key criterion is absence of 'forces majeures' in order to get things straight again in the business practice', said Dangis. A European Code of Conduct certainly needs to be introduced in Europe, to provide some objective rationale against which the validity of 'forces majeures' declarations can be assessed, if we want to maintain a competitive plastics Industry and to avoid more translocation of converting plants to outside of the EU."
'It is extremely disappointing that we will not be able to aggressively seize business development opportunities and claw our way out of recession in certain countries in the way that we had hoped. Customers need to be aware of this situation and recognise our current economic vulnerability.
In order to further monitor the development of this issue EuPC will be working with its National Plastics Associations to survey the problems at the converter level and analyse the results after summer.
