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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24/09/2026

Packaging, Print and Plastics Meet in Manila 🌏

PackPrintPlas PHILIPPINES brings the packaging, plastics, printing and office-supplies industries together under one roof, the only event of its kind in the country. It takes place at the SMX Convention Center in Manila from 8 to 10 October 2026.

Held annually, PackPrintPlas is a meeting point for machinery, technology, products and services across these fields, connecting international suppliers with buyers in the Philippine market. It is organised by Global Link MP with Messe Düsseldorf Asia as co-organiser and is part of the K-Alliance.

It also reflects a wider family of leading fairs from Messe Düsseldorf, with interpack for packaging and drupa for print complementing K for plastics and rubber.

Together they open up these industries to exhibitors and visitors worldwide.
👉 Learn more about PackPrintPlas PHILIPPINES: https://bit.ly/4qrfjTn

23/09/2026

Nobody thinks about the little rubber stopper on a medicine vial. But without it, that medicine might not work at all. 💊

The wdk - Wirtschaftsverband der deutschen Kautschukindustrie - is drawing attention to something most of us have never given a second thought: the rubber closures on pharmaceutical vials, vaccine bottles and infusion solutions. Small, unspectacular, and genuinely critical.

Volker Krings, Managing Director of the TPE Association within wdk, explains what's actually being asked of that little piece of rubber. It's in direct contact with the drug inside, so it can't release any substances into it, absorb anything from it, or alter the preparation in any way. At the same time, it has to seal reliably and stay highly elastic - especially in injection vials, where a needle punctures the stopper and, once withdrawn, the puncture point has to seal itself back up completely. Only rubber can do that.

Freeze-dried medications push the requirements even further. The stoppers used for those need to stay flexible down to minus 40°C, allow water v***r to escape during the freeze-drying process, and then seal the container tightly enough that no moisture can get back in during storage.

As Krings puts it: a small rubber stopper looks unremarkable at first glance, but it takes on central functions for the safe storage and use of medications. Modern healthcare, in other words, would be unthinkable without high-performance elastomers.

A good reminder that some of the most important materials in the plastics and rubber industry are also the ones we notice least. 🌍

21/09/2026

Tyre to Tyre: Four Companies Close the Loop ♻️

Pirelli, Pyrum, Synthos and BASF have joined forces on a European tyre-to-tyre initiative that turns end-of-life and scrap tyres back into raw materials for new ones, reducing reliance on virgin feedstock.

The loop runs across the value chain. Pyrum uses pyrolysis to recover carbon black (rCB) and tyre pyrolysis oil (TPO). The recovered carbon black partly replaces virgin carbon black at Pirelli, while BASF co-feeds the oil into its production to make butadiene and styrene. Synthos then turns that circular feedstock into synthetic rubber, which returns to Pirelli's tyre manufacturing. Every step is certified under the ISCC PLUS scheme for traceability.

As the partners put it: "Genuine product circularity cannot be achieved by a single company acting alone. It requires creating industrial ecosystems involving players with complementary expertise."

Rubber is often the harder half of the circular economy story, which is what makes collaborations like this worth watching, and exactly the kind of progress the global community follows at K.

20/09/2026

A Strong Future Starts With Strong Children

Today, 20 September, Germany and Austria mark World Children's Day. The 2026 motto from UNICEF Deutschland and the Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk puts it simply: "Starke Kinder, starke Zukunft," strong children, strong future.

The idea resonates well beyond any single industry. As UNICEF's Christian Schneider notes, "A strong future for all will depend on how much we strengthen children today."

For our industry, the future is exactly what the work is about. The materials, the circular solutions and the innovations shaped in plastics and rubber are ultimately about the world the next generation will grow up in. And the curious minds of today are the engineers and scientists who will keep shaping it tomorrow.

On World Children's Day, that feels worth pausing on: strong children, and a future worth building for them.

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.

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