Medical Plastics News talks to Dave Gray, head of content for Interplas Insights and British Plastics & Rubber, about the upcoming Interplas show at the NEC, Birmingham on 26-28th September and what the medical industry can expect to see.
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After 75 successful years of Interplas, why do you think the plastics industry has always been so important?
Plastic remains to this day the material of the future; it's particularly important in the medical sector, all the applications that are under development at the moment are really made possible by plastic.
There is no other material that has the versatility of polymers. When you think about what we've just been through with COVID-19 and you think about things like ventilators, drug delivery for your vaccine, even things like shields and PPE for places of work, all those things would not have been possible.
For people to be able to carry on going to work due to PPE, you cannot make anything as quickly as you can with plastic in terms of mass production, so I think that's why it is such an important area for such an important industry.
The future continues to be strong for plastic. Unfortunately, it does have an image problem at the moment. It's less about a problem with the material and more about the problem with our recycling infrastructure and our behaviour as people with the way that we value the product.
If we were talking about gold, people wouldn't think twice about making sure that they look after it and they protect it. But unfortunately, plastic is seen as cheap and disposable and therefore people treat it that way and that is 50% of the problem.
The other 50% is the infrastructure; there are modern recycling technologies coming out all the time. Unfortunately, they're very difficult to get approved for use and scale up. So, we're stuck with quite an old-fashioned, archaic recycling infrastructure, but that's changing, and I think that will help with the longevity of the industry.
Plastic is not going anywhere, it is a vital part of our everyday lives.
Are you doing anything special to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Interplas?
The fact that it's the 75th anniversary of the show is really exciting. We've had lots of conversations with exhibitors and visitors already, and I think there's a real buzz about the show now. We've got lots to celebrate and we're doing that with lots of different activities.
We thought about what we could do to mark 75 years of Interplas. I think the thing that defines this industry is the individuals that work within it. So, we've put it out to the industry itself, we designed this survey last year which we sent out to all of our various communities in the plastic space and we've asked them to nominate 75 individuals who they feel have been most influential in the industry - could be living or deceased, but it's got to be somebody who has made an outstanding contribution to the sector.
Whether that's through developing a certain processing technology or discovering a particular material or an application, design, it could be anything - but it must be somebody who has really championed the use of plastics.
Other than your 75 most influential people, what else is new this year?
We're launching the Interplas Insights Conference, which is exciting.
We've got a diverse line up of sessions and we've played about with the format as well. So, in previous conferences, there’s been a standard format with half hour or hour-long presentations. What we're doing this time is having a mix of shorter, snappier presentations throughout the day, all clustered around various themes.
Some of the themes include diversity, sustainability, recycling, contract manufacturing and medical, of course, which is one of the biggest areas.
One of the things that we'll be talking about, which I think is particularly pertinent to medical, is contract manufacturing and how the supply chain challenges of recent years have impacted contract manufacturers, for better or worse, whether that's been an element of reshoring or whether material challenges have slowed things down.
Could you tell us a bit about the diversity in plastics initiative?
Diversity in plastics is not really a new initiative, it's more of a development of the women in plastics brand that some readers might be familiar with.
The priority for the plastics industry – and I think engineering in general including medical engineering, is really on skills and recruitment; there's a huge skills gap in engineering in this country and one of the ways we believe that you can start to close that skills gap is by looking at your approach to recruitment, in particular diversity within the workplace.
That's not just diversity of gender, but also diversity of age, because there's no secret that in the plastics sector, the skilled workforce is ageing out of employment and unfortunately there's not the necessary amount of young talent coming into the industry to fill those roles.
Diversity of age is super important, but of course there’s also gender, race, religion, and ethnicity. All the protected characteristics have a have a part to play, and historically the plastics industry hasn't been the most diverse.
What can the medical industry expect to see at Interplas?
We've got some brilliant contract moulders on the show floor - more contract moulders than we've ever had before at Interplas.
This is important as the medical industry has a burgeoning start-up scene with new ideas for devices being developed all the time, and that's where your contract moulders come in, because they don't just provide a manufacturing service, they usually provide design expertise and material selection support with your tooling.
There are some brilliant SMEs in the UK who are highly skilled in the medical sector. They understand the regulation, they understand what's needed from material choice, they understand the processing challenges.
If you're coming to the show with a design idea for a new medical device, you will find your manufacturing partner at Interplas, I'm sure of it.
On the other hand, if you're a major brand owner in the medical space already manufacturing medical devices at scale, you still need to keep on top of your material knowledge, and we have pretty much all of the major chemical companies represented via their UK distributors at the show.
Those distributors have in-house medical teams who are dedicated to this marketplace, and they again will be able to guide you through what the latest materials are and how they help you meet your regulatory challenges.
To find out more about Interplas and to register for free, go to interplasuk.com/.