Crompton to expand into new factory

June 29, 2000 - Crompton Plastics of Banbury is to build a new 24,000 sq ft factory on the Thorpe Way Industrial Estate in Banbury. It will keep its polyurethane production at the existing Thorpe Way factory, and give it room to expand by moving its composites facilities to the new site.

A new name in US polypropylene production

June 29, 2000 - Sunoco, one of the largest independent oil refiners in America with five refineries, is going into the polypropylene business. It is forming a joint venture with Epsilon Products Company in which it supplies propylene from a plant in Pennsylvania to a neighbouring PP plant run by Epsilon. The joint venture will be owned by Sunoco, and one of Epsilon's owners, BAR-L, itself an affiliate of compounder Washington Penn Plastics and part of the Audia Group which also owns trading company Sirius Chemicals and colour concentrate manufacturer Uniform Color Company.

Cadillac plans new web portal

June 29, 2000 - Cadillac Plastics is setting up a portal site for sales of plastics rod, sheet, tube and film. Cadillac, which was recently sold by M A Hanna to GE Plastics, reckons to be the world's biggest distributor in this sector, with 117 locations in 15 countries.
     The new web site will include products from several producers. Cadillac already has a number of extranet links with its current clients, giving customers customised catalogues, contact lists and ordering facilities.

Sealed Air to buy Dolphin Packaging

June 29, 2000 - Dolphin Packaging, which makes plastic packaging products for modified atmosphere applications in Leeds and Liverpool in the UK, and in Ireland and the Netherlands, is to be bought by Sealed Air Corporation of the USA, best known for its bubble wrap. The sale comes about as Dolphin's founders chairman Harry Evans and director Jerry Robinson approach their seventies with no immediate family to succeed them. The bid from Sealed Air values Dolphin at around £78 million. Dolphin has some 750 employees and last year turned over around £54 million.

New research centre for plastics

June 29, 2000 - A Faraday Centre for plastics is to be opened at the University of Warwick. Faraday Centres are research and development organisations set up with government funding. The first four were opened in 1997, and the new Faraday Plastics is one of four new centres.
     Faraday Plastics will be run jointly by the Warwick Manufacturing Group and Rapra Technology. It will receive around £2·2 million of funding from the Department of Trade and Industry and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for the first three years, and after that it is expected to become self-funding. The centre is also expected to receive around £3 million from the European Union and other sources.
     The brief for Faraday Plastics will be to coordinate research, education and knowledge dissemination, and facilitate closer relationships between centres of learning and small and medium sized enterprises in the plastics industry. In this role it takes over from the Partnership in Plastics initiative, and associate partnerships have been formed with Bradford University, the British Plastics Federation, the Gauge and Toolmakers Association, the Institute of Materials, Materials Engineering Research Laboratory, Polymer Centre of the South West and the Scottish Polymer Technology Network.
     One of its functions will be to act as a 'help desk' through a web site which has been registered as www.faraday-plastics.com.

New Dow SR plant on stream

June 29, 2000 - Dow Chemical has started up the solution elastomer plant at its Schkopau site in Germany. The 60,000 tonnes plant uses Nippon Zeon technology and can produce different solution elastomers such as S-SBR, low-cis BR and block copolymers. It is built next to the existing E-SBR and nickel high-cis BR plants, and the three plants are operated from a single control room.

Barlo increases sheet output

June 29, 2000 - Sales volume for Barlo Plastics increased 29 per cent in the year to March over the 1999 period, with turnover up 23 per cent to Euro 121 million. Barlo Plastics is the largest extruder of transparent sheet plastics in Europe with more than 15 per cent of the market. During the year it bought ICI Acrylics' Nischwitz plant in Germany which has an annual output of 8,500 tonnes of extruded acrylic sheet (compared with the 16,000 tonnes of acrylic sheet produced elsewhere in the group last year) and sold PVC film extruder Stanley Smith. Barlo is currently expanding its polystyrene sheet activities in the Czech Republic with the building of a new plant, due to be finished by December, which will house the production currently based both in Belgium and the Czech Republic.

PMDA is reborn with the emphasis on export

June 27, 2000 - The Plastics Machinery Distributors Association has reinvented itself. This morning it shook off the image of a machinery importers club and became the Polymer Machinery Manufacturers & Distributors Association.
     The change was in part a reaction to the founding last year of PARMMA, the Plastics & Rubber Machinery Manufacturers Association, which stressed the role of UK manufacturers, and in particular the export needs of those companies. The PMMDA acknowledges that PARMMA gave it 'a kick up the backside'. But the new structure resulted primarily from a survey of members which showed that 45  per cent of PMDA members were involved in export, with 25 per cent of the association's members' £720 million turnover coming from overseas sales - a function not previously dealt with aggressively by the 'importers' association'.

£1m investment to go into R-RIM

June 26, 2000 - Taylor Engineering and Plastics of Rochdale has expanded into reinforced RIM with a £1 million investment in a Krauss-Maffei metering machine and two mould carriers. The Comet machine is the first of its type to be bought by a British company since 1989, and will produce mouldings up to 7 kg, such as vehicle bumpers, side panels and skirts. It has been modified to use Bayer's Bayflex 180 system.

Chronos Richardson taken over

June 26, 2000 - Materials handling specialist Chronos Richardson has been taken over. The BMH Division of Babcock International Group has bought Chronos Holdings and all its group companies worldwide.
     BMH chief executive Dr Gernot Schäfer has become chairman of the Chronos Richardson Group, and existing Chronos Group directors Mike Sanderson, Karl Peach and Kurt Schroth continue as directors and executives. Chronos Richardson has been renamed BMH Chronos Richardson.

Coloration can cause problems with tamper evidence

June 26, 2000 - The refusal of drum caps to part from their tamper-evident rings may not be because they have been moulded slightly oversized, as once thought, but because of their colour.
     Research at the National Physical Laboratory has found that the presence of a pigment - and in particular, phthalocyanine blue - can alter the morphology of the material so that it may be possible to screw the whole cap/ring assembly from the drum without shearing the cap from the ring as intended. This is because the presence of the pigment causes PE and PP to crystallise with many more and much smaller crystals, resulting in a decrease in Young's modulus and an increase in failure strain.
     A report is available, e-mail.

Cast resin tooling makes production injection moulds in three days

June 26, 2000 - A cast resin rapid tooling system from MCP Equipment is said to be capable of making tools for production scale injection moulding in three days - and at a quarter of the cost of comparable steel tooling.
     The process uses an aluminium-filled two-part resin, cast in two stages on a master model, usually produced on a rapid prototyping or CNC system. The tool can incorporate inserts and cooling channels.
     The resin is free flowing in its initial stage to follow model detailing. After hardening it is post-cured before de-moulding. The resultant mould is said to have the stability of aluminium, and a moulding surface that can be polished to a mirror finish. At 250 degC the material is sufficiently deflection resistant to withstand injection moulding, and it has a compressive strength of 260 N/mm². The cured resin can be machined for mould modification.
     Apart from injection moulding, MCP sees potential for tools for RIM, PU foam, vacuum forming, autoclaving, blow moulding, alloy casting and rubber moulding.

European plastics demand keeps on rising

June 26, 2000 - European demand for thermoplastics increased 6 per cent during 1999 to more than 30 million tonnes. The latest West European Plastics Industry Report from AMI shows that the main impetus behind the growth came from the packaging sector, particularly PET bottles, extruded sheet/thermoformed packaging and polyethylene film. The big five packaging materials - PE, PP, PS, PVC and PET - account for around 93 per cent of demand, and their share was up 6·4 per cent to more than 28 million tonnes in 1999. The biggest single material remained polyethylene. Increases in demand varied according to grade. There was strong growth in high density material where growth increased by nearly 9 per cent to 4·6 million tonnes. Linear grades now account for around 20 per cent of the whole polyethylene market, increasing by more than 13 per cent, and demand for metallocene materials was up by 30 per cent - although they still only represent around 1 per cent of the total market.
     The packaging market was also the strongest spur to polypropylene growth, with demand up 7·6 per cent to 6·6 million tonnes. The emphasis here was on thinwalled containers.
     PVC, despite counter pressure from environmentalists, saw demand rise 2 per cent, although the driver here was the building industry rather than packaging.
     Sheet extrusion increased demand for polystyrene, which rose nearly 5 per cent on 1998.

     As in previous years, the fastest growing single material was PET, which has averaged an annual 16 per cent growth throughout the 1990s. Demand is now 1·3 million tonnes, 90 per cent going into bottles. A particular upward jolt in 1999 was in Germany where refillable bottles were accepted by mineral water bottlers, and demand for material shot up 30 per cent.
     Demand for engineering materials was not as strong as for the commodity polymers, increasing only 3 per cent to 2·3 million tonnes. It was held back by flat demand for ABS and SAN, although demand for polycarbonate and PBT increased 7 per cent.
     Overall prices travelled downwards during the first half of 1999, continuing the trend of the previous year, but they steadied at about half year and some price increases were implemented towards the end of the year. This contributed to the growth in demand as some stock building took place during the final quarter.
     Nationally, the UK saw the poorest increase in demand as processors suffered from the strength of Sterling against the weak Euro.
     Despite the braking effect of the exchange rate, the film extrusion sector in Britain increased exports by 20,000 tonnes to 135,000 tonnes, and saw local demand for domestically produced film rise 3·5 per cent to 1,058,000 tonnes, according to another AMI report, Guide to the UK Polyolefin Extrusion Industry.
     The film industry has undergone substantial rationalisation and investment since 1994, and the concentration of film lines in the hands of large groups has moved from 53 per cent to 63 per cent last year.
     AMI identifies 200 polyolefin extrusion operations in the UK, running more than 1,300 lines, most of them being used for polyethylene. Polypropylene extrusion lines are estimated at fewer than 40.

Milacron adds MPX control and raps Husky's knuckles over personal computers

June 23, 2000 - Moldflow Plastics Xpert (MPX) optimisation software is to be integrated as an option with Ferromatik Milacron's Xtreem NT injection moulding machine control system. This will enable users to optimise set up and monitor the moulding process without the need for additional hardware. The Xtreem controller uses Windows NT on PC hardware, networked using Ethernet.
     Integration of personal computers and machine controls may seem commonplace today, but there are some heavily proprietary aspects, as Husky has found to its cost. It has been sued by Milacron for breaching a Milacron patent covering the integration of personal computers and machine control systems. In return for an undisclosed payment, Milacron is granting Husky a license to use the technology, and is dropping its suit in the US federal district court and a complaint to the International Trade Commission requesting an exclusion order barring import to the US of the Husky machines believed to infringe its patents.

Enthusiasm for plastic car bumpers waning in America

June 23, 2000 - If you thought that plastics were taking over the car bumper business you would be very wrong - at least in America. A study conducted by the American Iron and Steel Institute shows that not only do plastics hold a relatively minor market share in bumpers, this share is due for a major slump. The AISI says that the market share of steel bumper systems - by which it means chromed or painted face bars and reinforcing beams typically covered by plastic fascias - increased from 76 per cent in 1997 to 86 per cent this year. By 2004 steel is projected to have 91 per cent of the market.
     Plastic bumpers had nearly 18 per cent of the market in 1997, dropping to 11·5 per cent this year,and with a forecast further fall to 7·6 per cent in 2004. The difference is made up by aluminium which at its best represented 6 per cent of bumpers made in 1997 and is expected to be used for only 1·4 per cent in 2004.
     The current edition of the report is available on www.autosteel.org.

Big name boost for B2Bs

June 23, 2000 - Three on-line polymer and technology distribution companies are being boosted by the addition of major names in the polymer business.
     Advanced Elastomer Systems has confirmed that it is to join ElastomerSolutions.com set up by Bayer, CK Witco, DSM Elastomers, DuPont Dow Elastomers, Flexsys, M A Hanna Rubber Compounding and Zeon Chemicals and scheduled for a third quarter start-up.
     M A Hanna - and thereby probably PolyOne - is joining Omnexus, the injection moulding focused site set up by BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont and Ticona/Celanese. Also joining is Solvay.
     And in a slightly different vein, Ticona is to become a member of Yet2.com, a technology exchange listing 3M, Dow, DuPont and Honeywell among its founders.

Ferro buys Solutia additives

June 23, 2000 - Ferro Corporation is to buy Solutia's polymer modifier business, including its plant at Newport in Wales. This, together with the plant at Antwerp in Belgium, will give Ferro a European base for its otherwise mainly American polymer additives business. Also included in the deal is a plant in Bridgeport, New Jersey, USA, although Solutia will keep a part of this facility used to make Tetrathal flame retardants. The main product line in the sale is Santicizer plasticisers.

Eastman pitches PET at beer bottles

June 22, 2000 - Eastman Chemical has introduced a PET grade ready coloured for the manufacture of beer bottles. AmberGuard is coloured to give maximum protection from UV and visible light degradation of the beer, which could otherwise lead to reactions that destroy the flavour. Eastman says it will also work with the brewing industry to establish a standard for amber PET to aid recycling.

Colour masterbatch works with rigid PVC

June 22, 2000 - A polymer specific colour masterbatch for PVC has been developed by ColourTone Masterbatch in collaboration with PVC distributor CJP. It works in flexible PVC, but its primary selling point is that it can be used in rigid PVC without the compatibility and homogenisation problems which can affect physical properties.
     The free-flowing granular masterbatch can be dosed at 1 - 2 per cent in filled or unfilled materials, and can be overdosed without danger up to 5 per cent. Far from reducing the physical properties of the base polymer, ColourTone says its masterbatch can ease processing, improve weld strength, give increased ductility and impact strength - especially at low temperatures - and impart a high gloss finish.
     UV stabilisers and absorbers can be added to further improve the weatherability of material containing this masterbatch. Formulations can use pigments to meet European food contact, packaging and EN71 (toy) criteria.

Ticona plans LCP, PPS expansions

June 22, 2000 - Following DuPont's announcement that it will double its capacity for liquid crystal polymers Ticona has now announced a similar move for its Vectra material. The company is to add three reactors to the two at its Shelby, North Carolina, USA plant, more than doubling capacity to 8,500 tonnes by February 2002. The investment will cost around Euro 30 million.
     Ticona's Japanese joint venture with Daicel, Polyplastics, is already expanding its own Vectra capacity, with a 2,000 tonnes extension due on stream later this year.
     Ticona is linking its expansion in LCP directly with the growth in the internet, as a key market for the material is in electronic components - more than 80 per cent of Vectra output goes into electric/electronic components. It is predicting an average growth rate from a demand of 12,000 tonnes in 1999 at 25 per cent a year to reach 24,000 tonnes by 2003.
     Another engineering thermoplastic expansion planned by Ticona is for its Fortron Industries joint venture with Kureha Chemical Industries to debottleneck its Fortron PPS plant in Wilmington, New Carolina, USA. Capacity is being increased by 1,800 tonnes to 7,250 tonnes by the end of the year, effectively doubling the capacity that originally came on stream in 1994.

Injection moulding B2B site gets a name...

June 20, 2000 - The business to business web site for injection moulders planned by BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont and Ticona/Celanese has come a step closer with the announcement of a name, and with it an address. The site will be operated by an independent business called Omnexus, from www.omnexus.com. Andersen Consulting, which is also involved in AllPlastx.com, is providing the business input and technology.
     Omnexus will have headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, USA and in Switzerland. It is due on line on October 1 in the USA, January 1 in Europe, and in Asia and the rest of the world by the spring of next year.

...while chemicals customers get a choice of two

June 20, 2000 - Another grouping joining the business to business stampede will set up two independent companies to operate AllianceChem.com and ChemSingleSource.com in Europe from the end of the year.
     These sites are intended for broader chemicals distribution, although polymers and polymer chemicals are likely to be part of the package. The partners are Biesterfeld, Brenntag, Ellis & Everard, Penta and Solvay.
     AllianceChem.com is aimed at companies buying small and medium amounts of chemicals, while ChemSingleSource.com is dedicated to single source supply to medium and large users of chemical products.

Rhodia appoints GE Polymerland

June 20, 2000 - GE Polymerland is to become worldwide distributor for Rhodia's Technyl nylon range. Technyl, which is made in eight plants in Europe, America and Asia, is said to span the widest range of flame retardant and impact modified nylons. In Britain Technyl has been distributed by Plastribution for some years. No-one was available at Plastribution to comment on the effects of the GE Polymerland appointment.

Hanna/Geon is named

June 20, 2000 - The merger between M A Hanna and Geon has now been blessed with a name. It was announced today that it will be called PolyOne Corporation, reflecting singleness as a source of supply, and the combination of two sets of business expertise.

Schmalbach-Lubeca to be owned by private equity company

June 20, 2000 - Speculation over the fate of the global PET packaging specialist Schmalbach-Lubeca is over - at least for now. Earlier in the year a number of world scale packaging companies were expressing interest in acquiring Schmalbach as its parent company VIAG was merging with VEBA and planning to dispose of non-core activities.
     A week ago VIAG and VEBA gained approval for their merger to become E.ON, the world's biggest privately owned energy services company and a major specialist chemicals company - it is to merge Degussa-Hüls with SKW Trostberg. Schmalbach is now to be eased out of the group by initially transferring the 59·8 per cent of shares held by E.ON into another group company AV Packaging. AV Packaging has made an offer for the shares held by minority investors which gives them a healthy premium over Schmalbach's current share price. When AV Packaging has acquired the remaining shareholding, private equity company Allianz Capital Partners is to increase its stake to 51 per cent, thereby reducing E.ON's majority, while leaving E.ON involved in Schmalbach 'to participate in Schmalbach-Lubeca's value development' before withdrawing completely.

Vita sees sales boom in rubber compounds

June 20, 2000 - Vita Salford's specialist rubber compounding division Vita-Calender has reported export sales for the first quarter of this year up by 30 per cent on the same period in 1999, and home sales up by 15 per cent. The sales uplift also represents a 20 per cent or more increase over the past 12 months average. Much of the new business has come from the Middle East, Far East and Eastern Europe, with particular interest from the printing industry.

DSM EPP buys Torlon shapes business

June 20, 2000 - DSM Engineering Plastic Products has extended its stock shapes capacity by taking over the Torlon polyamide-imide compression moulding business of BP Amoco's Amotech Performance Plastics in the USA. DSM EPP was already the primary producer of Torlon in extruded rod and plate stock forms, and the addition of the Amotech manufacturing facilities has broadened its product range.
     Torlon shapes have been used in applications such as severe service seals and components in turbo compressors, where they are machined into precision-tolerance finished parts. The material has an inherent resistance to frictional and corrosive wear, and maintains its dimensions at high temperatures.

Sandretto takes on robot agency

June 20, 2000 - Sandretto UK has taken over the UK agency for Dal Maschio robots and beside-the-press ancillaries from Italmachinery, which was set up at the end of 1998 to focus on importing Italian-made plastics machinery. Dal Maschio has been building robots for unloading injection moulding machines since 1975 and has a standard CNC range for use with moulding machines from 50 to 600 tonnes, as well as pneumatic robots and sprue pickers and the ability to custom-build. It has also built up a speciality, largely through an association with moulding machine manufacturer Italtech, in automation systems for unloading very big machines and, for example, supplied the automation for a 6,000 tonne Italtech machine.
     More recently the company has expanded into other ancillary equipment, and makes a range of granulators, hopper loaders, conveyors and dryers.
     Sandretto has not had a 'captive' moulding robot, although last year it did a million and a half pounds worth of automation business using robots from a number of suppliers.
     Four different Dal Maschio robots will be in action on Sandretto machines at a forthcoming series of open days, running from July 4 to 6.

Bayer plans to join PBT venture

June 19, 2000 - Bayer has invited itself into the proposed European world scale PBT plant being explored by DSM and Ticona. If the feasibility study into the plant shows it to be worthwhile, it will come on stream in 2003. PBT growth is currently running at around 7 per cent and Bayer is keen to strengthen the market position of its Pocan series.

K-M ties up with Italian fridge maker

June 19, 2000 - Krauss-Maffei has signed up with an Italian company to make refrigerators, giving it an increased presence outside the automotive industry which is currently its main market for PU equipment. The deal is with Perros of Milan, which in future will equip its lines with K-M mixing heads and foam reaction systems.

Milacron sets up metal injection moulding machine division

June 19, 2000 - Ferromatik Milacron North America has started a metal and ceramic injection moulding machinery business unit and is introducing it at the NPE exhibition in Chicago with demonstrations on a new range of budget-priced small machines, the Vista Edge.
     The Milacron MIM machine package can be applied on a variety of the company's small-tonnage machines and includes wear-resistant barrels, screws, screw tips and nozzles.
     The demonstration at NPE is the moulding of 17-4 stainless steel turbine impellers using a no-scrap hot runner setup. The part has a diagonal cross section of 25 mm, and multiple blades around 0·38 mm thick. It would take several hours on a five-axis machine to produce a single part, with additional time required for post processes such as polishing. By injection moulding 'green' parts are produced in less than 90 seconds, needing only sintering - no debinding, polishing or plating - to finish.
     Milacron is working with a supplier of aqueous-based feedstock, which eliminates post-moulding binder removal, typical with wax- and/or polymer-based feedstock. This cuts cycle time and eliminates environmental concerns. The feedstock also allows lower pressures to produce long, thin-walled parts and accommodate soft epoxy tooling made by rapid prototyping equipment.

Coinjection machine 'is world's biggest'

June 19, 2000 - What is described as the world's largest coinjection press has been built by Ferromatik Milacron North America for a major Midwestern moulder. The 6,600 tonne two-platen machine, the largest injection machine ever built by Milacron, is to mould large parts for the automotive, heavy truck, and marine industries, as an alternative to metal and SMC.
     The four tiebar two platen Maxima machine has two injection units of 10·3 and 11·7 kg at 1,860 bar capacity feeding a single nozzle through a patented coinjection manifold. Dry cycle time is said to be comparable to a machine half its size - a 2 m stroke in about 11·3 seconds.
     Clamp stroke is 3·8 m, platens are 3·5 m square, and maximum daylight is 5·4 m. The machine accommodates moulds up to 90 tonnes.

Bayer buys US blowing agent manufacturer

June 19, 2000 - Bayer has bought a blowing agent manufacturer in the USA. It has taken over the Hughes Industrial Corporation of Kennesaw, Georgia, which makes chemical blowing agents mainly for PVC applications. Hughes' HRVP and Flow-Cell brands in powder, granules and liquid dispersions will be added to Bayer's Ficel line.

Great Lakes increases antioxidant prices, and introduces a new one

June 18, 2000 - Great Lakes Chemical Corporation has increased the price of its Lowinox 22M46 and Lowinox CPL hindered phenolic antioxidants by DM 0·50/kg in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
     The company has also introduced a new phenolic antioxidant, Lowinox 1790, intended for use with polyurethane fibres and polyolefins. The material is said to have outstanding resistance to gas fading and extraction, and to show excellent synergy with secondary antioxidants for long term heat stabilisation.

Danisco amalgamates at new plant in Scotland

June 18, 2000 - Danisco Flexible has amalgamated two of its Scottish operations - Danisco Flexible FlexCo in Livingston and Danisco Flexible Deeside in Stonehaven - to form Danisco Flexible Oakbank. The new division will operate from a new factory in Livingston, which is expected to be operational by November. Oakbank will have five presses, three of them eight-colour short run machines, and facilities for lamination, bag making and de-metallising.

Industrial scale solvent-based PVC recovery plant for Italy

June 18, 2000 - The first industrial scale plant for the mechanical recycling of PVC using a selective dissolving process is to be built at Ferrara in Italy, with a start-up date of mid-2001.
     The plant will use the Vinyloop technology developed two years ago. This uses the total solubility of PVC in some biodegradable solvents to separate the PVC from other components - in this instance mainly from cable scrap and packaging. The PVC is then recovered from solution at a quality said to equal that of virgin material, and the solvent is recovered for re-use.
     The new plant will be run by a consortium of five companies: Solvin Italia, part of Solvin, the 75 per cent Solvay/25 per cent BASF European PVC major; Adriaplast, an industrial sheet/food packaging/credit card producer in the Solvay group; Fitt, a mainly Italian producer of flexible and rigid PVC pipes; Technometal electricity and telephone cable producer; and Vulcaflex, which coats and calenders PVC.
     The plant, which is costing Euro 8·5 million, will have a throughput of 8,500 tonnes a year. Its construction fits in with the voluntary agreement by various companies involved in PVC production and use to take an environmentally responsible approach to the use of the material.
      The Vinyloop process is also to be used in a tarpaulin recycling project by Ferrari Textiles Techniques in France.

DuPont to double LCP capacity

June 18, 2000 - DuPont is to double capacity for its Zenite liquid crystal polymer. In a two-stage programme it will increase capacity at its Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA plant by 50 per cent to 5,000 tonnes by the third quarter of next year, and then push capacity up to 8,000 tonnes at some future time.
     During next year DuPont will also increase compounding capacity for Zenite in Japan.
     The main spur for growth is expanding demand for connectors and other electrical and electronic components, but there are other new applications which the company expects will take Zenite into new markets.

Singular claim for materials B2B site

June 17, 2000 - With the epidemic of business to business web sites for the sale of plastics materials, it is odd or foolhardy that getPlastic.com should claim to be 'the only on-line procurement marketplace designed specifically for engineers and purchasing professionals who locate and buy raw materials for plastics products'.
     getPlastic bases this claim on being 'the first and only independent, vendor-neutral e-marketplace in the plastics processing industry.' It has a search engine, materials database and custom compound design software that can specify a material according to a design need, check pricing and availability of 35,000 materials worldwide, and design custom compounds with the aid of experienced plastics engineers.

Silica prices rise

June 17, 2000 - Degussa-Hüls has increased the prices of its precipitated silicas and silicates by 5 per cent.

Contour Marking moves

June 17, 2000 - Contour Marking has moved to bigger premises at: Albert House, Gledrid Industrial Park, Gledrid, Chirk, Wrexham LL14 5DG. The telephone number is 01691 770093, fax 01691 770023.

Jackdaw rebrands as Vitamide

June 14, 2000 - Jackdaw Polymers - which was bought by British Vita in 1995 - has rebranded its nylon compounds as Vitamide. New packaging will be coloured blue for nylon 6 and red for nylon 6.6 and copolymers. The same branding will be used for materials produced at Littleborough in Lancashire and at Lyons, France.

RPC promotions

June 14, 2000 - Philip Jones has been appointed general manager of RPC Containers, Oakham, with Mark Ellis as deputy general manager. Both men previously held other managerial positions at Oakham.

One-stop chiller support shop

June 14, 2000 - Coolmation has extended its chiller maintenance and refurbishment services beyond machines of its own make, and is now offering support for all makes in use in the plastics processing sector. Its service engineers carry spares and other equipment compatible, says the company, with virtually all chillers, enabling them to carry out minor fixes on a first visit to prevent problems escalating.

Atofina opens in Solihull

June 14, 2000 - Atofina UK's new sales office in Solihull will be open for business next Monday (June 19). At the same time its head office is moving from Berkshire to the Stalybridge site in Cheshire.
     Atofina UK is the new name for Elf Atochem UK. The address of the Solihull office is: 1 Focus Park, Ashbourne Way, Cranmore Boulevard, Shirley, Solihull, West Midlands B90 4QU. The telephone number is 0121 746 5502, and fax 0121 744 3153.

Degradable plastics company plans share sale

June 14, 2000 - Degradable packaging manufacturer Symphony Plastic Technologies is planning to trade on the OFEX market to raise £3·2 million to finance its growth in the Middle East, and the European and Caribbean areas. The share sale - between June 20 and July 20 - is expected to bring the company's market capitalisation up to £18·7 million. Symphony has also appointed Sir Christopher Benson as chairman and non-executive director. He is a past chairman of Boots.
     Symphony makes polyethylene packaging incorporating a photo-/thermal degradation additive that breaks the film down to CO₂ and water over a period of months.

German machinery output worse than expected, but the future is booming

June 14, 2000 - Output from the German plastics and rubber machinery industry in 1999 was slightly lower than forecast earlier this year. After the record year of 1998 production dropped 6·4 per cent to a value of Euro 3·4 billion. This was mainly due to a 5·9 per cent drop in exports, but home sales also fell 1·6 per cent against rising imports - due, according to the VDMA to the increased delivery times being quoted by German manufacturers with full order books.
     Exports fell markedly in Europe (down 10·7 per cent) and in Latin America (down 23·5 per cent) but the falls were compensated for by increases in the Near and Middle East, China and Singapore, and in the USA, which continued to be the biggest export market for German machinery, with an increase of 10·4 per cent to nearly Euro 0·5 billion - 20 per cent of the export total. Overall exports were 72 per cent of output.
     In the second half of 1999 orders increased 6 per cent, while in the first quarter of this year orders received shot up by 35 per cent, and the VDMA is correcting its earlier 5 per cent growth forecast to 10 per cent.

Vantico rises from Ciba sell-off

June 11, 2000 - The Performance Polymers division of Ciba Specialty Chemicals is now operating independently as Vantico, following a management buy in/buy out backed by Morgan Grenfell Private Equity.
     Vantico is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and has production sites in Switzerland, Germany, Spain, the USA and China, as well as the plant at Duxford in the UK. It is structured in three divisions:

Kraton to expand capacity

June 11, 2000 - The Kraton Polymers business, being spruced up for sale by Shell, is being expanded with a de-bottlenecking operation, and then a capacity increase, which together equate to what the company defines as a world-scale plant.
     In the first stage de-bottlenecking will add 13,000 tonnes capacity of Kraton G SEBS at Belpre, Ohio, USA and in Berre, France by 2002. A further 6,000 tonnes of capacity will be added by 2003.

EPDM price rise

June 11, 2000 - DSM Elastomers Europe is increasing the price of all its Keltan EPDM grades by Euro 0·07/kg on July 1. The increase will apply worldwide.

Growth in PolyTHF

June 11, 2000 - BASF is expanding its capacity for PolyTHF polytetrahydrofuran - a precursor for thermoplastic and cast polyurethane elastomers, thermoplastic polyester, polyamide elastomers and elastomeric fibres. It has increased capacity at its Korean site from 20,000 to 30,000 tonnes, and is to expand its Luwigshafen, Germany capacity from 16,000 tonnes to 56,000 tonnes by early 2002. This will bring BASF's world capacity up to 124,000 tonnes.

DSM invests again in nylon 6

June 11, 2000 - DSM has opened an 85,000 tonnes nylon 6 plant at Emmen in the Netherlands, partly replacing the unit that it bought from Akzo Nobel in 1992. The new plant will produce grades for engineering plastics, film and industrial yarn.
     This is DSM's fourth investment in nylon 6 in around a year. Early last year it opened a 50,000 tonnes plant in Augusta, Georgia, USA and later opened a PA6 carpet waste recycling unit on the same site. Recently it announced an involvement in a 50,000 tonnes plant in China.

Wallace buys the Mooney Viscometer

June 11, 2000 - Test instrument manufacturer H W Wallace & Co has bought the rubber test division of Negretti Automation. This brings into the Wallace portfolio the Mooney Viscometer, originally developed by SPRI, the Sondes Place Research Institute - for whom Wallace's sales manager Brian McGarry used to work. Wallace will continue to manufacture instruments and spares for the thousands of existing instruments in the field.

New name for Elf Atochem

June 11, 2000 - In line with group changes following the merger of TotalFina and Elf, Elf Atochem UK has changed its name to Atofina UK.

Price increase for LCP

June 11, 2000 - DuPont Engineering Polymers is increasing the price of its Zenite LCP by 5 per cent on July 1. The increase spans Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Contico to spend £1 million

June 11, 2000 - Contico Europe Holdings of Redruth in Cornwall, a subsidiary of Katy Industries, is planning a £1 million investment in new machinery. It has ordered three injection moulding machines - two 610 tonne and one 1,100 tonne - from Sandretto, which will be supplied with robots and downstream equipment.

Searle takes over at Britton

June 11, 2000 - New chairman of the the flexible packaging specialist Britton Group is Richard Searle, until now chief executive officer at Blagden plc. Previously he has been chief executive of Riverwood International Europe, CMB Closures and Johnsen & Jorgensen Packaging.

Toshiba goes solo in the UK

June 2, 2000 - Toshiba has set up its own UK operation to sell injection moulding machines, latterly distributed by Stevens International. It has opened Toshiba Machine Co in Milton Keynes (60 Burners Lane, Kiln Farm, Milton Keynes, MK11 3HD, telephone 01908 562327) under the management of Tom Watanabe. Tony Newbold moves from Stevens as general sales manager.

Expansion in Brazilian PP capacity

June 2, 2000 - Polibrasil, the Montell/Suzano joint venture in Brazil, is increasing its polypropylene capacity to 660,000 tonnes. A new plant scheduled for start up in 2001 will be increased in capacity from the planned 240,000 tonnes to 300,000 tonnes. In addition the company is to expand an existing plant from 180,000 tonnes to 240,000 tonnes.