K - The World’s No. I Trade Fair for Plastics and Rubber

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K - The World’s No. I Trade Fair for Plastics and Rubber

Welcome to K – The World's No.1 Trade fair and the world's leading and most important trade fair for the global plastics and rubber industry.
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17/09/2026

ColombiaPlast: A Gateway to Latin America's Plastics Market 🌎

As part of the K-Alliance, ColombiaPlast returns to Bogotá from 28 September to 2 October 2026, bringing together the plastics, rubber, petrochemical and packaging industries and connecting international suppliers with qualified buyers and decision-makers.

For K exhibitors, it is a direct route into one of South America's leading industry hubs. Colombia is the fourth-largest plastics and rubber market in Latin America, which makes the show a strong starting point to explore the market, meet potential partners and grow a presence in the region.

Messe Düsseldorf North America co-organizes ColombiaPlast with its partners Acoplásticos and Corferias. As Alexander Düring, Director International Events, puts it: "We want ColombiaPlast to create qualified connections that grow into long-term partnerships and business opportunities."

The focus stays on the relationships that last well beyond the event itself.

👉 Explore ColombiaPlast and plan your participation: https://bit.ly/4ilN5Hr

16/09/2026

A New Chapter for Omya's Polymer Distribution ♻️

At the Omya booth, Carsten Harms introduces Omya Performance Polymer Distribution, a newly independent business with a sharper focus on distribution and a clear growth journey ahead.

In this short video, he shares why sustainability sits at the core of it, and why K is the right moment to bring the team and partners together.

14/09/2026

Advanced Materials for Aerospace: Syensqo and Airbus Sign a New Supply Agreement ✈️

Syensqo has secured a new long-term supply agreement with Airbus. The multi-year contract covers a broad range of advanced materials, including prepregs, RTM resins, adhesives and primers, supporting Airbus programs across commercial aircraft, space and defense, and helicopter platforms.

Behind every modern aircraft is a growing share of high-performance composites and bonded structures. As the aerospace and defense market sees strong demand and ambitious production rates, the materials that enable lighter and more efficient manufacturing become a strategic factor in their own right.

"This contract reflects our long-standing commitment to the aerospace industry and reinforces our position as a trusted partner to one of the sector's leading OEMs," says Rodrigo Elizondo, President of Syensqo Composite Materials.

For Syensqo, aerospace remains an important growth driver, with sustained demand in civil aviation expected to support its composite materials business through 2026.

Agreements like this show how far advanced materials reach into the products around us, and why they stay central to the conversation the global community brings to K.

11/09/2026

Food-Grade Recyclate From Household Packaging Waste ♻️

Household lightweight packaging waste was long considered unsuitable for food contact. Interzero has developed a mechanical recycling process that changes this, turning sorted packaging into food-grade recyclate.

At its site in Dessau, the material runs through shredding, washing, re-sorting and advanced treatment to become mechanically recycled polypropylene (mrPP), suitable even for demanding uses such as high-acid foods, hot-fill and microwaveable products. A pilot plant is scheduled to start producing technical test materials in 2027.

The timing is not accidental. From 2030, EU packaging rules introduce minimum recycled content, starting at 10 percent post-consumer recyclate in non-PET plastic food and cosmetic packaging, which raises demand for high-quality, food-safe material. A BCG study for the BDI estimates that recycling and reuse could replace 20 to 40 percent of raw material imports by 2045.

Interzero's CEO Jan Kroker presents the new site as part of building a more circular and resilient supply of raw materials in Europe. As Head of Sorting and Processing Thomas Herkert notes, that shift depends on both investment and the right political framework.

Closing the loop for food-contact packaging is one of the harder problems in recycling. Progress like this is exactly the kind of development the global community follows at K.

09/09/2026

Turning Shop-Floor Data Into Answers, in Any Language 🤖

In this video, Lisa Hallmann from Reifenhäuser Next explains how the team is tackling two challenges many production sites share: high workforce fluctuation as experienced people retire or move on, and a shortage of skilled workers who are hard to find.

Their answer brings together three building blocks, Next AI, Next Learning and Next Data, inside a single chatbot for the shop floor. It reads live data from the line, helps with troubleshooting, and pulls in learning content on demand. Ask for the quality trend of the last three hours and it returns a graph. Ask how to adjust the air ring and it explains the step, then offers a training video, available in multiple languages.

That multilingual layer is deliberate. An operator can ask in Spanish and get the answer in Spanish, which helps overcome language barriers on the shop floor.

What stands out is the discipline behind it. The chatbot only answers from validated content that has been fed in, with background checks making sure it pulls the right data rather than guessing. Ask it for the weather and it will simply say it does not know. First customers are already using it, with good feedback, and the content keeps growing.

Digitalisation and applied AI on the production floor are among the developments shaping the plastics and rubber industry, and the kind of progress the global community follows at K.

08/09/2026

A First for PET Tray Recycling in Africa and the Middle East ♻️

The K exhibitor Boretech has partnered with the Egyptian Chinese Company (ECC) to deliver GreenTech, the first dedicated PET tray washing project in Africa and the Middle East. The facility will be built in Egypt.

The line is designed to process 4,000 kg of PET trays per hour and turn them into high-quality flakes for tray-to-tray recycling. Post-consumer PET trays are difficult to process, which is why Boretech's washing system combines material loosening, intensive hot washing, a Mega Aspirator and enhanced yield technologies to keep quality and output high.

"Boretech's innovative recycling technologies and extensive project experience in PET recycling give us great confidence in this collaboration," says Mahmoud Samir, owner of ECC.

Tray-to-tray recycling closes a loop that has long been hard to address, and seeing it reach a new region is a meaningful step for circular packaging.

03/09/2026

The Polymers Inside Every Skyscraper 🏙️

Todays Skyscraper Day puts the towers themselves in the spotlight. The materials that make them work usually stay out of sight, and a surprising share of them are polymers.

Steel and concrete carry the load, but polymers do much of the quiet work in between. Silicone sealants and rubber gaskets keep facades tight against rain and wind, while staying elastic enough to absorb the movement that wind and temperature swings cause in a tall building. Polyurethane and polystyrene foams cut heat loss and improve sound insulation. Epoxy and resin coatings protect steel from moisture and corrosion and extend the life of the structure. Carbon- and glass-fibre-reinforced plastics can strengthen columns, walls and beams, which matters in renovation and earthquake protection. And from cable insulation to pipes and cladding, polymers add lightweight, formable parts that install quickly.

Fire safety is where this expertise really shows. On high-rise facades, material selection, fire-protection coatings and testing are held to strict standards, and the industry keeps advancing them, improving formulations, test methods and certification so that high-performance materials and safety move forward together.

The takeaway: polymers rarely carry the whole building, but for sealing, insulation, protection and modern facade design, they are close to indispensable. A good reminder of how far material choices reach, and the kind of applied know-how the global community brings together at K.

02/09/2026

Why Study Plastics Engineering? Because It's the Future ♻️

In this short video, Professor Christian Hopmann, Director of the Institute of Plastics Processing at RWTH Aachen, makes the case for a career in plastics engineering.

His starting point: sustainable solutions can only come through technology, and that technology is created by plastics engineers. The materials we choose will shape whether we can fly and travel more sustainably, whether the hydrogen economy succeeds, and how far we get with a circular economy and recycling in plastics. Many of those questions are still open, and technical by nature.

Plastics are everywhere you look, which is what makes the field so diverse and demanding, with strong career prospects in everything from start-ups to global corporations.

For the plastics and rubber industry, the next generation of engineers is what turns these ambitions into reality. Supporting that talent is part of the conversation the global community brings to K.

28/08/2026

What's Really Inside a School Bag? ✏️

Every new school year, millions of pencil cases, bags and pens land in children's hands. Look closely and each item is a small lesson in material science, with plastics and rubber chosen for very specific jobs.

A ruler or set square is usually polystyrene or the higher-grade PMMA, crystal-clear and dimensionally stable so the scale stays precise. Pens rely on ABS, PP or PS for impact resistance and a comfortable grip. Erasers can be natural or synthetic rubber, or PVC-free thermoplastic elastomers, where what counts is how well the material lifts graphite off the page. School bags use tear-resistant polyester, increasingly as recycled PET, and lunch boxes and bottles use food-safe PP or Tritan.

There is history in the pencil case too. The eraser owes its use to a piece of rubber that Edward Nairne picked up by accident in 1770, and it took Charles Goodyear's vulcanisation in 1839 to turn sticky natural rubber into a durable elastomer. Later came celluloid and Bakelite, among the first plastics that replaced materials like ivory.

Today the shift is toward recyclates and bioplastics, and much of that material comes from the industry itself. Exhibitors at K such as FKuR, The Compound Company and BIOTEC develop the recycled and biobased compounds that are finding their way into everyday products.

👉 Read the full story in the K-Mag: https://bit.ly/4gDMXke

26/08/2026

Tiny Parts, Huge Quantities, Maximum Precision ⚙️

Demand for micro parts made of silicone is rising across medical technology, automotive electronics and other industries. At its headquarters in Marchtrenk, Austria, starlim, the world's largest silicone processor, runs an entire department for micro molding, complete with its own cleanroom and MicroPower injection molding machines from WITTMANN.

At starlim, anything below a part weight of ten milligrams counts as micro. One of their sample parts, a silicone O-ring measuring 0.7 by 0.4 mm, is too small to pick up with your fingers, yet it is produced in the millions. A two-component hearing aid component shows what that precision is for: a blue LSR membrane inside a robust PBT frame, held to tolerances of plus or minus two micrometers, because accurate sound reproduction depends on it.

The all-electric MicroPower brings the full process onto around two square metres of floor space, from clamping and injection to automation, temperature control and quality control. Because fully vulcanised LSR cannot be recycled, moving the injection plunger right up to the mould parting line matters: it reduces or removes the sprue and saves material. Quality control is now being built directly into the cell, with an in-line vibration test that checks the membrane inside the cavity using a sound emitter and laser measurement in the robot gripper.

"MicroPower machines cope reliably with these extreme challenges and ensure a safe process for us," says Dominik Kreuzmayr of starlim, pointing to 15 years of close cooperation with the WITTMANN Group.

Micro molding is a field where quality can often only be judged under a microscope. It is also a clear example of how machine precision, tooling and materials know-how come together in modern plastics processing, the kind of expertise the global community follows at K. 🔬

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