— By Plasteurope.com staff — 

In Philippa Wüst’s nursery, all is still well with the world. The three-year-old enjoys playing with plastic toys, said her father Hendrik Wüst, German state North Rhine-Westphalia’s minister-president, at the reception hosted by Kunststoffland NRW (www.kunststoffland-nrw.de) on the eve of the K trade fair in Düsseldorf.

The Christian Democrat state leader’s public statement was met with goodwill by the 300 guests in attendance, possibly because the industry is currently facing powerful headwinds. The concluding panel discussion focused primarily on the industry’s existential issues and challenges. Panel participants such as Tim Hartmann, CEO of chemical park operator Currenta, Detlef Höhner, managing director of semi-finished product processor Murtfeldt, and Mark Hellweg, managing director of Hellweg Maschinenbau, agreed that the plastics industry is suffering from overregulation and prohibitively high energy costs.

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The situation has worsened again recently, said Hellweg, whose company manufactures waste shredders and has so far successfully bucked the general economic downturn. As a medium-sized business owner, he is under enormous economic pressure and fears that the pressure of the crisis will cause him to lose his entrepreneurial creativity, Hellweg added.

The fact that Silke Krebs, state secretary in the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Economic Affairs, Industry, Climate Protection, and Energy, reported during the discussion on reducing bureaucracy that her ministry primarily viewed plastics waste as garbage – while her colleagues from the Ministry of the Environment, Nature, and Transport saw it as a resource – did nothing to strengthen the confidence of those in attendance that politicians had already developed a common idea regarding recycling requirements.