The Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance (SPFA), the educational and technical voice of the spray polyurethane foam (SPF) industry, has announced a 2019 Road Show for the association’s Professional Certification Program (PCP). Designed to promote safety and the highest standards in the installation of spray polyurethane foam, the certification program will be brought to various locations across the country in partnership with industry-leading companies, to ensure its availability to participants in key regions nationally.

BASF plans to build a TPU as well as an engineering plastics compounding plant at the company’s proposed integrated chemical production (“Verbund”) site in Zhanjiang, China. The company said that these will be the first production plants to come onstream at the site. The TPU plant will have a capacity of 32,000 t/y; the engineering plastics compounding plant will supply a capacity of 60,000 t/y of these products.

Dow has opened a SleepStudio location in Lake Jackson, TX, USA. This marks the company’s second SleepStudio location worldwide after the first was established in Horgen, Switzerland, late last year. The facility is a collaborative meeting and demonstration space that is intended to foster dialogue and education and advances comfortable sleep. The studio brings together technical expertise and industry insight to drive bedding design, innovation and polyurethane material science forward.

Itasa, an expert in the production of release liners, has successfully initiated production at its new plant located in Querétaro, Mexico. The 7,000 m² building that hosts the plant was completed in less than eight months, and the site allows a possible future expansion with an option to double the building capacity.

Monitoring Recyclates for Europe (MORE) is a new unified digital platform to monitor the uptake of recycled polymers into products. The IT platform is available to be used by converters since 25 April 2019. It was developed by EuPC in cooperation with its members and in support to the European Commission’s EU Plastics Strategy. Its objective is to monitor and register the plastics converting industry’s efforts to reach the EU target of 10 million t of recycled polymers used annually between 2025 and 2030.

Due to the Hennecke Group’s steady growth and the integration of Hennecke-OMS (former ‘Impianti OMS’) at the end of 2017, Hennecke has restructured parts of its external organization and worldwide agency network. On 1 April 2019 CTM UK Ltd. became the exclusive agent for the entire Hennecke Group product range in the UK and Ireland and is now offering a comprehensive range of services that focuses on the machine and systems technology portfolio of both core brands, Hennecke Polyurethane Technology and Hennecke-OMS.

Lanxess has entered into close collaboration with Citrine Informatics, a US-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) expert specialising in data-driven materials development. The companies have launched a pilot project aimed at gauging the potential of Artificial Intelligence for the plastics production. The aim is to further optimise the glass fibres that Lanxess uses for reinforcing many of its plastic compounds.

Bö-La and TactoTek have signed an agreement for Bö-La to market and sell injection molded structural electronics (IMSE) solutions. Bö-La has specific expertise in delivering high quality cosmetic surfaces, technical screen printing, illumination and film-insert-molding (FIM) / in-mould labeling (IML). TactoTek said that the vast majority of its IMSE customer cases are for user interfaces that require flawless cosmetics and that Bö-La’s film-insert moulding skill is recognised by leaders in automotive, appliance and electronics markets as consistently meeting the highest standards.

OSV has launched a new metering and mixing solution for processing multi-component quasi MDI polyurethane systems for lab and R&D applications, the OSV SmartLab.