Modern Hot Melt Adhesives - for Environmental Benign Applications, 2003 PLACE Conference & GLOBAL HOT MELT Symposium

The finiteness of many natural resources made it necessary to think about how to save them. The realization of the necessity to save resources of all kinds by using less material and energy in production or considering reuse and recycling early leads to the idea of sustainable development. This idea is especially useful when in industrial processes large amounts of resources are consumed.

If we look at most objects of daily use that are produced today in industrial production plants in a very large number of pieces, we can see that these are generally complex products which often consist of several different materials. Hence it is not surprising that bonding technologies are important in industrial production engineering. Of the many different adhesive technologies used for these joining technologies, hot melts have especially prevailed in recent years. One reason for this is the possibility to execute very fast production processes. In addition, hot melts support the idea of saving resources. With the help of hot melts many products and production processes can be designed to save considerable amounts of resources in production. By choosing the right hot melt that does not disturb the reuse or the recycling of the primary materials considerable material saving is possible.