New Plastech: 24 years of industry knowledge on a new platform
We have completed the largest technology migration in Plastech’s history. The portal has been moved to a new platform and thoroughly rebuilt, while the entire archive collected since 2002, including articles, market data, the company directory, B2B offers and the forum, remains available at the same address.
A digital industry archive since 2002
The oldest thread on the Plastech forum dates back to 19 December 2002, and the oldest news item was published nine days later. The portal was therefore already operating before the launch of Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, the Chrome browser and the first iPhone.
When Plastech was created, many people connected to the internet via modem or SDI. Since then, technologies, devices and the way information is used have changed, but the address has not: plastech.pl.
Over nearly 24 years, we have collected, among other things:
- almost 21,000 articles in Polish and English language versions;
- nearly 6,000 company profiles;
- more than 140,000 B2B offers published throughout the history of the marketplace;
- more than 20 years of plastics price quotations;
- 2,307 industry events;
- 5,633 threads and 14,676 posts on the forum;
- 636 Plastechopedia entries;
- more than 17,000 user accounts.
The article archive alone comprises 98 million characters of content, or about 54,000 pages of standardised typescript, equivalent in volume to around 200 novels.
The plastics price series, in turn, covers the global financial crisis of 2008, the pandemic, supply chain disruptions and the European energy crisis. It is not only the history of the portal, but also a digital chronicle of the Polish and European plastics and packaging market.
The entire portal rewritten from scratch
The previous version of Plastech had been developed and expanded for years, but it used technologies, some of which had long no longer been officially supported. Adding further functions to such an architecture was becoming increasingly difficult, so instead of another partial modernisation we decided to rewrite the service from the ground up.
The new application consists of more than 1,000 PHP files, 854 templates and 2,335 supported URLs. Its launch also required the preparation of 225 changes to the database structure. Automatic quality control is particularly important. The previous application had no automated tests. The new one has more than 4,000, and the code is additionally checked with every change.
The scale of the work was much greater than the implementation time may suggest. The scope of a similar project carried out by a traditional development team can be estimated at around 20,000 man-hours, and its cost, at market rates, would be measured in millions of zlotys.
Carrying out the migration so quickly was possible thanks to intensive human work supported by AI tools. These tools helped analyse the old code, recreate the operation of individual parts of the portal, prepare tests and organise documentation. However, the final decisions, change control and responsibility for launching the service remained with us.
In just over one hundred days, nearly 477,000 lines of code and around 55,000 lines of documentation were created.
The portal was switched to the new platform on 27 July 2026 during a single planned maintenance window. The entire archive was preserved and migrated without data loss. After the launch, we are continuing stabilisation and optimisation work.
Our own repository of more than 85,000 images
The new Plastech has its own media management system. The database currently contains 85,305 original photos, logotypes and graphics with a total volume of more than 57 GB.
The system automatically prepares appropriate image variants for computers, tablets and phones. Including responsive versions, the media repository contains around 335,000 files occupying nearly 74 GB.
If the original images were viewed one per second, without any break, reviewing the entire collection would take almost a full day.
A search engine that understands meaning
The new search engine is no longer limited to simple matching of entered words. It combines classic full-text search with semantic search.
As a result, it can better recognise the user’s intent and find materials semantically related to the query, even if they do not contain exactly the same wording.
More than 19,000 documents have been equipped with vector representations used by the semantic search mechanism. For example, a query about a material used to produce bottles may lead to information about PET, even if a given document does not contain the identical wording entered by the user.
This is particularly important in a service with tens of thousands of publications, company profiles, definitions and market data. The new search engine also makes it easier to reach knowledge collected over more than two decades.
Plastech is read by people, search engines and AI systems
The internet of 2026 looks completely different from the internet of 2002. Content published on the portal is read not only by users and classic search engines, but also by bots used by artificial intelligence systems.
In July 2026, Plastech’s own server statistics system recorded 5.02 million page downloads. Less than 4 percent were user page views - a total of 189,000 page views in 71,000 sessions. The remaining 96 percent were generated by indexing robots, link preview systems, SEO tools and crawlers operated by technology companies.
The scale of AI system activity is particularly interesting. Robots identifying themselves as GPTBot or ChatGPT made more than 417,000 downloads of Plastech pages in July. This is about 2.5 times more than Googlebot, which made around 165,000 downloads in the same period. Anthropic robots accounted for a further 64,000, and Perplexity for almost 10,000.
These data do not mean that robots are replacing users. They do show, however, that Plastech’s specialist content is becoming a source of information not only for traditional search engines, but also for AI systems that answer their users’ questions directly.
In the baseline measurement from August 2026, we recorded 7,181 citations of plastech.pl pages in Bing Copilot responses.
For this reason, we want the portal’s content to be correctly read and understood by both search engines and AI systems. The new portal provides them with structured data describing articles, definitions and navigation.
This is also important for our clients and advertisers, who expect published information, brands and offers to reach the widest possible audience. Good visibility of Plastech in search engines and AI system responses increases the chance that this content will be found also beyond the portal itself.
More privacy and security
The new Plastech does not use external scripts to track user behaviour. We have discontinued Google Analytics, and statistics are now collected in our own server-side system, without transferring the history of visited pages to external analytics platforms.
We have replaced Google reCAPTCHA with a solution running on our own infrastructure. Passwords are secured using modern algorithms, and users’ older passwords are automatically migrated to the new system during login.
Write operations have been protected against request forgery, user content is filtered depending on the module, and forms are protected by a multi-layer anti-spam system.
Before switching the service over, we also carried out a security audit and removed vulnerabilities inherited from the previous application.
Plastech is more than a portal
The new platform is the technological foundation of Plastech’s broader information ecosystem.
Alongside daily news, the company directory, business offers, Plastechopedia and market data, we are developing PlastechTV. Our archive already contains more than 650 videos: interviews with industry representatives, reports from trade fairs, technology presentations and materials produced directly at manufacturing plants.
Plast Echo magazine also remains an important part of the brand, combining in-depth editorial materials with print and distribution at the most important industry events. The magazine’s digital archive already includes more than 50 issues available on the service.
The portal, PlastechTV and Plast Echo create a shared communication space for plastics producers, processors, machinery suppliers, packaging companies, recyclers, industry organisations and representatives of science.
We preserved the history and changed the foundations
The purpose of the migration was not to create a completely different Plastech. We wanted to preserve its specialist character, archive and functions that the industry has been using for years, while completely rebuilding the technological foundations of the service.
This allows us to continue developing the portal and implement ideas that would have been difficult or impossible to deploy in the previous system.
Almost everything that the user does not see on a daily basis has changed - so that what the user does see and use works faster, more securely and more conveniently.
Welcome to the new version of Plastech.
Read more:
