COVER STORY
IAN BOLLAND SPOKE TO ANNA-MARIA BERTASA, GLOBAL MARKET MANAGER – HEALTHCARE, SOLVAY, ABOUT NAVIGATING THE PANDEMIC AND THE FOCUS ON SUSTAINABILITY IN THE MEDICAL PLASTICS SECTOR.
W
ith a company that is exposed to so many different markets, it’s fair to say that Solvay has had something of an up-and-down period during the pandemic.
“At the beginning of the emergency there were lots of projects we had been working on at a very fast speed, like trying to help with the emergency. We provided transparent films for the production of face shields and other protective equipment, and we had to face an exponential surge of the demand for a product that is utilized in the production of ventilators, as a lot of customers had to produce, very quickly, a huge number of these devices.”
Many different parts of the economy in several countries suffered as the pandemic took hold and everyone’s habits had to change because of Covid-19.
Solvay’s role in ventilation production involved supplying specific polymers, Radel PPSU and Udel PSU, to customers that expanded the production of their already approved devices so they could get to the front-line more urgently.
Companies who develop materials, components and devices for the healthcare setting naturally experienced a spike in demand of certain products at the start of the pandemic, as Anna-Maria Bertasa explains.
Though many would feel that the pandemic would mean a huge spike in demand for healthcare applications, Bertasa mentioned there was a significant decline of consumption in the orthopedic space, as non-lifethreatening procedures were postponed or canceled to tackle the health emergency, which is being slowly recovered. After the first emergency wave, another significant trend that Solvay experienced was the 40-60% growth of the biopharma sector linked
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