Biodegradable BASF Plastics Quite Outstanding

Ecoflex and Ecovio receive iF material award
The biodegradable BASF plastics Ecoflex® and Ecovio® recently received the iF material award 2007. The International Forum Design (iF), the design center in Hannover (Germany), this year conferred the award for innovative materials and material ideas for the third time.

The iF material award provides a platform for manufacturers, designers and design engineers to showcase their design ideas in the four categories of material and material application, product, idea and process. In this year’s competition the jury evaluated altogether 120 submissions.

The two plastics Ecoflex and Ecovio are among the six winners in the material and material application category. Dietmar Heufel, Global Business Management Biodegradable Polymers, accepted the iF material award: “Ecoflex and Ecovio open up a huge range of opportunities for designers. They are suitable, for example, for packaging materials, can accept print in eight colors and possess great mechanical strength. Furthermore, Ecovio can be modified to make it suitable for injection molding and thermoforming applications.”

The jury for the iF material award justified the honor to BASF plastics, inter alia, on the grounds that Ecoflex can be employed with great versatility especially in the packaging sector since it is waterproof, tear-resistant, elastic, printable and weldable.

Ecovio, a further development of Ecoflex, is the first BASF plastic based on renewable raw materials. The plastic consists to the extent of almost 50 percent of polylactic acid (PLA) derived from corn. The other component is the biodegradable plastic Ecoflex based on petrochemicals. From Ecovio customers can produce tailor-made blends. Depending on the mixing ratio of Ecovio with Ecoflex or PLA more flexible or more rigid formulations are possible. Thus, among other things, it can be used to produce flexible films, for manufacturing carrier bags, for example. Even on its own Ecoflex allows many different applications including mulch films in agriculture, cling films, laminates for packaging and breathable films in the hygiene sector to name just a few examples.