European plastics processors are watching with “considerable anxiety as polyethylene and polypropylene become shorter and shorter” in a year that could turn out to be one of the defining ones for the European plastics industry, according to the Polymers for Europe Alliance. The organisation, which was established last year in response to the spate of forces majeures announced for European plastics production lines (see Plasteurope.com of 29.05.2015), has explicitly called for a suspension of EU tariffs on polymer imports.

Although the number of FMs declared so far in 2016 has not been the same as last year, the Alliance – which is part of European Plastics Converters (EuPC, Brussels / Belgium; www.plasticsconverters.eu) and Polymer Comply Europe (PCE, Brussels / Belgium; www.polymercomplyeurope.eu) – has brought the situation to the attention of the European Commission and the Economic Tariff Questions Group. “The issue at hand is very simple,” the Alliance said. “If EU plastics converters cannot get access to sufficient volumes of polymers, they will ultimately go out of business.”

While the Alliance thought the seriousness of the situation was acknowledged by all players along the value chain, its proposal to lower the duties from 6.5% to their earlier 3% level was “rigorously resisted” by several polymer producers, it said. On top of that, a number of EU member states – the UK, Italy, Spain and Portugal – actually opposed the final request for a modest quota of material to be subject to the lower tariff duty.

“Given the objections made by certain polymer producers to the tariff requests, and the uncertainty of EU rules applicable to these requests, the Polymers for Europe Alliance is calling for a review of these rules via amendments to the applicable law.” That, the Alliance said, is the only way left to fix a system that is unfair and fails to protect the competitiveness of the European plastics conversion industry, which employs about 1.6m people and generates annual turnover of EUR 380 bn.

Plasteurope.com's Polyglobe capacity database (www.polyglobe.net) shows that as a result of maintenance works, output restrictions and FMs, nominal European HDPE capacity currently stands at 86%, while that of LDPE is down to 83%. After a large maintenance was just completed, PP availability has once again returned to 87%.