Regulatory Responsive Antioxidants and UV Stabilizers!

 Antioxidants      UV Stabilizers    

Global plastic additive suppliers are in a business environment where increased regulatory pressures are shaping their current new product development offerings. Specialty plastic compounders are focusing hard on fast-changing regulatory environment while simultaneously meeting ongoing customer antioxidant and UV stabilizer performance improvements.

New regulatory pressures are not only affecting allowable finished product standards but how the additive product is manufactured. Just over the past decade, 50+ countries have legislatively formalized new requirements on the chemicals business segment.

Top priorities here have centered on increased health and safety benefits that in turn will generate costlier additive manufacturing process steps, ultimately leading to antioxidant and UV stabilizer pricing volatility.

One leading global regulatory driver is taking place right now in the European Union (EU). The EU REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) has put in place this year new requirements on chemical products that include plastics additives in the 1-100 tons range per year that are either manufactured or imported into EU countries.

These EU REACH regulatory enhancements will eventually migrate into other key global geographies, such as:

• North America
• The Pacific Rim countries
• India, and
• Australia

This is because major European based chemical companies will want to standardize their products across the world to their competitive advantage. REACH regulations will almost certainly force some older antioxidant and UV stabilizer products from the marketplace.

What this all leads to is that global specialty compounders are currently in the process of:

• Reformulating a portion their antioxidant and UV stabilizer
• Strengthening their specialty ingredient supply chains, and
• Gravitating towards multiple site additive ingredient suppliers

Let's learn how the global plastic suppliers are meeting these requirements with their evolved products. But before that, let's understand some basics of antioxidants first...