We must state this plainly: The U.S. attack on Iran has proven to be an amateurishly executed failure. The Iranian regime has held its ground and will thus gain dominance in the coming years. But it is also clear that, at this point, further military escalation would do more harm to the rest of the world than to the Iranian regime.
Even in difficult times, there comes a point when one must recognize that it is time to stop banging one’s head against the wall and start looking for a way out. This principle applies not only to grand geopolitics. It also applies to more down-to-earth issues that the surface treatment industry has been grappling with for years.
Conflicting positions have long since ceased to be resolved constructively. They are relabeled, shifted to other procedures, or carried on administratively until the affected companies eventually have to ask themselves whether there can still be a future for them in Europe under these conditions.
One example of this is the major REACH revision. Formally, it may be off the table—but in practice, many of its problematic underlying principles have long since found their way into administrative practice (details starting on page 11 in the mo issue 4/2026).
Regulation Between Risk and Value Creation
For the surface technology industry, this is not a marginal legal issue, but a matter of survival. Any regulator who presumes to define chromium(VI), PFAS, certain functional coatings, or other important groups of substances in a blanket and abstract manner as an unacceptable risk—and consequently to ban them—fails to recognize their significance for real-world value chains.
The functionalities of coatings are not optional in industry and must not be degraded on the basis of theoretical—or let’s try to find a more apt term for the factual basis of so many decisions made in Brussels—emotional considerations.
This is precisely why the Brussels regulatory approach is so dangerous, as it is increasingly moving away from concrete risk management and subjecting industrial applications to ever-stricter requirements for justification.
Numerous national governments have so far eagerly supported, intensified, and imbued this bureaucratic frenzy with moral weight under the guise of environmental and political correctness. But prosperity does not arise from forms and reporting requirements, but rather from functioning businesses and industrial value creation that remains within the country.
Proportionality as a Prerequisite for Industrial Policy
Environmental and occupational safety are by no means secondary—but precisely because they are important, they must be regulated in a technically sound, risk-based, and proportionate manner. Symbolic thresholds, blanket bans on substances, and political pipe dreams help no one when production is relocated, supply chains break down, and alternatives are inferior, more expensive, and often technically less reliable. Regulation that does not seriously assess its side effects is not responsible industrial policy; rather, it constitutes a high degree of negligence.
Technical Solutions Instead of Political Slogans
This makes it all the more important that this issue also highlights where the true strength of surface technology lies: in concrete technical solutions. The industry is working intensively on tangible solutions for resource efficiency, process stability, automation, digitalization, and material savings.
Sometimes, a remarkable spirit of innovation is evident even in the smaller things—for example, in a grounding screw (page 40). Progress does not arise from grandiose slogans, but from smart solutions that reduce effort, stabilize processes, save material, and eliminate sources of error.
Our current situation provides plenty of examples of how costly it can be when problems are addressed primarily from an ideological standpoint. Yet expertise and a constructive willingness to develop solutions remain the only way to tackle complex problems.
It would be wonderful if this insight could finally gain greater traction again, both on a global and on a European level.
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