Stretch and Shrink Film 2019 Conference wrap up

Recently I attended the 2019 Stretch and shrink film conference in Barcelona. Good to spend two days with fellow industry partners to learn and discuss. Common practice at this conference is to start with AMI industry figures about stretch film, stretch hood and shrink hood. The expected growth rate for the next coming five years is 1,5%. This growth rate fits to an increasingly mature industry. Since product capacity has grown much faster and still seems to be growing. It is interesting to see how producers will cope with this gap.

Nestlé

Strong presentation from Nestle about the Nestlé company, their vision on stretch- and shrink film and their focus on sustainability. Great to see how a huge value adding company underlines the necessity to show the responsibility to take care of the environment and challenges suppliers to reduce the amount of plastic by maintaining performance. More than willing to help (f.e. with our Katan-Ex Bio Based film)!

Damage during transport

Although some info is shared several times over the years, some info you cannot share enough! An example is the fact, mentioned by Highlight, that the losses of product damage during transport are 1% – 4% of Sales (ten times the costs of film usage!) and thousands of people are injured because of unstable loads. This is why Trioworld is focusing on TCO instead of only the price per kg. of stretch film. For this we have developed a 7 step model. Making sure the customer does not only save in terms of stretch film usage but also in less stops in production and less damage to products. See our TCO movie.

Recycling

A lot was said about recycling where there seem to be 3 key challenges: the collection of material, the infrastructure (capacity to recycle) and the performance. I hope that our industry will spend resources and money to face these challenges. First of all it is better to be in the driver’s seat than to be pushed by governments and or customers/consumers. Secondly since it is incredibly important for our industry and last but not least since it is giving a lot of energy. Within Trioworld we have a strong strategic focus on Bio Based and recycled content. Recently we have developed a film containing 30% external recycled material + 20 % “internal recycled material”. Although price and performance are still a challenge we see it as a first step to a more sustainable industry.

Last week on a customer event a speaker astronaut mentioned that the battery of the first space ship has the same capacity as the battery of a Sony Play station. I hope examples like this (what to think of Elon Musks Tesla changing the car industry) will help us not to lose faith.

Hans Wels Commercial Manager Load Security Film