WCA September 2011

A passion for plastics

IN the course of your life you come across few people who will be indelibly printed on your memory. I don’t mean if you’re lucky enough to meet some of your sporting or musical heroes. I mean the man or woman in the street. You know. The one who enters a room and there is a presence around them. A person that other people look up to, listen to. Not out of fear, but out of respect. Step forward Signor Battista Faraotti, founder and president of Fainplast, a plastics compound manufacturer in Ascoli Piceno, a rather pleasant little city in Le Marche region of Italy. It took me – despite the language barrier – just a few minutes to understand why his employees put him in this bracket. He is a self-made man. He loves, clearly, his home city. He supports a wide range of initiatives involving the community – and sport features heavily in his company’s promotional activities. His employees are looked after. They have modern facilities, a gym, and a flexible approach to a working environment that works for the company, management and the ground-floor operatives. In other words, he invests his time, money and effort in

everything from electric cables, for pipes and profiles extrusion and for shoes and medical devices. Fortunately everyone at the company had gone out of their way to make this as un-technical as possible. To put it all into layman’s terms, if you like. And it is a clear testament to the owner, his shrewd management and his board that has led to a record-breaking year for the company founded just 18 years ago. Since then they have become a major player in the market, the biggest in the region and – despite what has been a tough time in the industry – one of the largest plastic compound manufacturers in Italy. In 2010 the company increased its turnover by some 45 per cent to €71.8m – up from €49.5m the year before. Some would argue that a refreshing attitude to investing in new production lines might just be the reason for that success.

Dateline n 1993 – Fainplast founded and starts production in Assisi n 1996 – The company moves to a new plant in Ascoli Piceno n 1999 – The covered areas are doubled and new office premises are built n 2001 – Production of halogen free compounds is started n 2004 – Medical compounds pro- duction begins n 2006 – Production of crosslinkable compounds starts the people who work for him and the surrounding area in which they live. I had been invited to spend three days on a fact-finding, factory-touring visit to discover everything about Fainplast. I saw everything from the testing stage – and there’s a lot of that at the site on an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city – through to the final production. These compounds – a staggering 620,000 tonnes each year – are then shipped off to customers who make

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❍ ❍ A warm welcome awaits at the Fainplast plant in Ascoli Piceno m