Roberto Todesco
Semki Chemicals SRL
Roberto V. Todesco obtained his Master Degree at the University of Ghent (Belgium) in 1975, followed in
1981 by a PhD at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) with a doctoral thesis on “ The Photo
Behaviour of bi-chromophores” and finalized his research work with a postdoc on “The Photo Behaviour of
Polymers” at the Radiation Laboratory (University of Notre Dame/South Bend in Indiana (USA).
Subsequently, Roberto worked for 2 years at DSM (the Netherlands) in the “Additives for Polymer Group”,
dealing with the stabilization of polymers (PO and Engineering Plastics) and joined Ciba Specialty
Chemicals (Basel/Switzerland) in 1988, taking care of the stabilization (process, thermal and light
stability) of polymers as resp. technical service engineer, head of analytics and finally as WW head of
the application laboratories.
In 2004 , Roberto joined Sabo International (Basel/Switzerland) as Technical Director, being responsible
for all technical aspects of stabilizers and surfactants (antistats, antifogs and dispersing agents)
produced at Sabo SPA (Levate/Italy).
Since 2016, Roberto started his own consulting company RVT Consulting (Allschwil/Switzerland) in the
field of additives for polymers
Abstract
In the field of the stabilization of thermoplastics e.g. polyolefins, styrenics, ABS, polyamide, a.o.
HALS (Hindered Amine Light Stabilizers), Phenolic Antioxidants and Processing Stabilizers play an utmost
important role. Without the existence of these additives, all these thermoplastics would have not expanded
successfully in all kinds of applications as we know today.
In today's situation of wars in Middle East and its possible negative consequences on the availability of
raw materials, increasing prices of energy and intermediates, it is very important, in order not to have
disruptions in your production to have alternatives available for the stabilizers you are currently using.
Furthermore, the more stringent EHS rules resulting from today’s REACH regulations, lead to restrictions
in the use of certain stabilizers(CMR, SVHC,..).
In this presentation possible solutions are proposed for several classes of stabilizers in
case you face problems as outlined above.