AGATEX at Paper Middle East 2026

From 15 to 17 September, PAPER-ME 2026 brings the paper, board, tissue and packaging industry of the Middle East and Africa together at the Egypt International Exhibition Center in Cairo. We won’t have a booth this year — we’ll be walking the halls, notebooks open. And frankly, that’s the part we look forward to most: the unscripted conversation at someone else’s stand, the problem described in three sentences that turns into a six-month development project.

Because the region is moving. New tissue capacity, more recycled furnish, rising quality expectations on coated grades — and every one of those shifts lands, eventually, as a chemistry question. Here are the three we hear most, and why we think each one is solvable.

Tissue is the hardest place to add anything. Softness, absorbency and purity are the product, and every additive is a potential threat to all three. Meanwhile modern machine speeds generate foam faster than almost any other grade, and hygiene and food-contact requirements rule out a good part of the conventional toolbox.

Good news: that trade-off is far less binding than it used to be. Silicone-free LAMEX® defoamers are where we point tissue producers first — not out of ideology, but because silicone-free formulations sidestep the deposit and rewetting issues that reappear later as spots, holes, or a sheet that no longer absorbs the way the spec promises. Foam gets controlled in the process and white water. Softness and rewetting stay exactly where they belong.

We make silicone-based grades too, and sometimes they’re the right call. What matters is that the decision gets made deliberately, for your system — not inherited from whatever happened to be in the tank last year.

Coating — Deckstrich — is where trapped air turns into visible money. A coating colour gets stirred, pumped, screened and applied, and picks up air at every stage. What arrives at the applicator as micro-foam leaves the machine as pinholes, streaks and craters, usually discovered several steps too late.

The encouraging part: these are two distinct jobs, and once you separate them, both get much easier.

The same LAMBATOL® chemistry pulls a second shift elsewhere in the mill: as emulsifiers stabilising oil-in-water and water-in-oil systems, with ASA emulsification for sizing as the classic case.

Packaging and board mills running high recycled content in ever-tighter water systems face a compounding problem: everything accumulates. Surfactants concentrate, foam turns chronic rather than occasional, additive consumption creeps up year after year. This is exactly the terrain our high-performance LAMEX® formulations for closed circuits were built for — and the target isn’t knocking down today’s visible foam. It’s a genuinely calm loop and a machine that simply runs.

Most of this is system-specific. The same defoamer behaves differently in two mills running nominally the same grade — so we’d rather prove it than promise it.

That’s what the AGATEX Innovation Center (AIC) is for: dynamic foam tests evaluating both foam collapse and foam prevention in your process water, measurement of wetting and impregnation times, lab sheets comparing formation and homogeneity. Fewer trials on your machine, shorter development cycles, faster answers.

We’ve been making specialty chemicals since 1921, with synthesis and formulation under one roof — no dependency on external key raw materials, and the freedom to build a formulation around your system instead of offering the nearest catalogue match. Developed and produced REACH-compliant, in a plant running on 100% renewable energy.

Our Sales Manager Lorenzo Zaazou is on-site all three days of PAPER-ME. If you run tissue, board or coated grades in the region and any of this sounds familiar, come and say hello — twenty minutes in the aisle beats any brochure.